Glass cage

Abstract

As new format of the cultural industry, reality shows have become the subject of academic interest in the last decade. Among the various analyzes about it, the most common are those related to the interest generated on a public eager for the obscene, or the perverse, in the Lacanian sense, for an “immediate access to the Real.” In opposition to this perspective, this paper seeks to develop the hypothesis that such programs present, in a plastered form, despite the proliferation of contents, our own social fantasy. i.e., it doesn’t shows a barred social scene, but this scene itself: the production world, organized according to capitalist flexible accumulation. This essay is not an abridgement, but a new presentation of some conclusions of my doctoral research on reality shows, done at the Department of Sociology of the University of São Paulo.