ABSTRACT
INTEREST IN THE EMOTIONS OF other people seems to be very much a part of contemporary culture, as is a pressure to reveal emotions and talk about them in both private and public forums (Lupton, 1998). We are supposedly living in a ‘confessional’ (Foucault, 1978) or ‘therapeutic’ culture (Furedi, 2004) that celebrates individual feelings, intimate revelations and languages of therapy. The role of the media and particularly television as a central public site for confessing one’s innermost feelings has been rightly stressed by media scholars (e.g. Dovey, 2000; Gamson, 1998; Livingstone and Lunt, 1994; Shattuc, 1997; White, 1992, 2002). After all, recent decades have seen an eye-catching rise of genres and programmes that offer opportunities for the public display of once-private feelings. Accordingly, we have witnessed an increase in the number of ordinary people who are willing to speak in a confessional voice (White, 2002). Confessional and therapeutic strategies are perhaps most prominent in reality television – although certainly they are not absent from informative genres such as the news either – where the outbreaks of raw emotion figure prominently in the attraction and popularity of the genre (see Grindstaff, 1997). […]
