Survivor Lessons: Essays on Communication and Reality Television

This collection of scholarly essays examines reality television. The first show, Survivor, inspired a national craze when it aired in the summer of 2000. Ever since, successors and copycats have been on each of the four largest networks. The basics stay the same: put a group of people into situations bound to cause conflict, and watch them squirm.

Rather than criticize the series' voyeuristic appeal, this work evaluates what goes on within the text of such shows and how they reflect or affect our larger culture. Contributors include researchers from communications, sociology, political science, and psychology. The contributions cover such topics as reality television's relationships with cultural identity, publicity rights, historical perspectives, trust, decision-making strategies, political rationality, office politics, and primitivism. Each chapter includes a bibliography.

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Matthew J. Smith is Professor of English and Dean and Director of The Ohio State University at Newark. He has published a dozen scholarly books focused on media and comics studies. He lives in Newark, Ohio.

Andrew Wood is an assistant professor at San Jose State University in California, where he teaches courses in computer-mediated communication, rhetoric, and popular culture.