How has the identity of the self been transformed through the cultural economy of entertainment and advertising?
Fair use.
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s article “Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen” makes a persuasive arguement about the changing relationship between television and social welfare, saying “television is quite literally helping to produce a privatized system of welfare” as part of a larger shift of social responsibility from public to private. However, their statement that “television in the United States is now a largely unregulated enterprise” made me consider the ways that the content of television and film is regulated. Over the summer, I watched a great documentary called This Film is Not Yet Rated (available on Netflix) about the way ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) are assigned to films. The film argues that there are disparities between the way certain kinds of actions are rated – violence is more permissible (rated acceptable for larger audiences) than erotic material, heterosexual sexual situations are more permissible than homosexual, and male sexual depictions are more permissible than female.
This regulation of content exists in television as well; the FCC forbids programming that contains obscenity, indecency and profanity. The FCC cannot specifically censor certain material (which would violate the first amendment), however, in practice, television programming has come to learn what the FCC will and won’t prosecute, and thus, censorship does exist. Though This Film is Not Yet Rated doesn’t explicitly address the content regulation/censorship of television programming, I would guess (anecdotally) that many of their conclusions would hold true for TV as well.
So what does the regulation of visual entertainment (TV and movies) have to do with identity regulation? It would seem to me that by censoring certain material – be it language or actions – entertainment is sending a message to viewers that they should avoid using this language or engaging in these acts, because they are “immoral” or “bad” (the supposed reason they are being hidden from viewers to begin with). Then viewers who do use this censored language, engage in these censored acts, might apply such labels to themselves, and begin to regulate their speech in their bodies so that they can become “moral” and “good.” Thus, enterainment becomes an agent of governmentality, enforcing biopower – though of course, most viewers don’t consciously realize the way entertainment and the absence of certain material is affecting them.
This Film is Not Yet Rated calls for a more transparent system for rating movies so that these disparities can be appealed and corrected; I would expand this to appeal for a better way for regulating (regulation which is de facto censorship) television beyond the arbitrary categories of “obscenity indecency and profanity.” The consumer should be given a choice of what kind of material to consume without the harmful influence of biased rating systems or, in the case of television censorship, the removal of choice entirely.
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