- Reality T.V is the development of a television genre. Reality TV is a catch-all category that includes a wide range of entertainment programmes about real people. Sometimes called popular factual television, reality T.V is located in border territories between information and entertainment, documentaries and drama. Originally used as a category for law and order popular factual programmes containing ‘on scene’ footage of cops on the job. Reality T.V has become the success story of television in the 1999’s and 2000s.
Kim Kardashian is an omnipresent figure in today's entertainment media. The daughter of O.J. Simpson's defence attorney Robert Kardashian, she first entered the public eye in 2007, gaining notoriety with a home-made sex tape. Soon after came a reality-television partnership with the E! network that spawned five distinct programmes, and from there Kardashian took on an ever-expanding range of promotional and licensing opportunities, building a successful brand. Throughout, media coverage has placed constant attention on her curvaceous body, locating it as a site where both her ‘realness’ and artificiality lie. This attention to her body, much of it promulgated by Kardashian herself, works to consistently flatten the many interplays between race, class and sexuality in her image in order to best position her as both an accessible and unique commodity in the marketplace of personality. This paper addresses how the portrayal of Kardashian's body is at once complex and contradictory, concurrently reinforcing heteronormative structures of reproductive, privatised sexuality and historic racial dichotomies positioning white bodies as restrained and non-white bodies as overtly sexual, while exploiting the interstices of these taxonomies for profit.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/22/zoo-kim-kardashian-cover-wrong
Why Zoo's Kim Kardashian cover is wrong.
The abundance of images sexualising and objectifying women does untold psychological damage to young people
It is not just the "glamour" of the photograph of Kim Kardashian on the cover of Zoo magazine's 26 May edition that draws the reader in: the expensive lacy red and black lingerie (colours woven into the rest of the cover), the artfully pseudo-natural hair and the heavy makeup. She presents herself in a sexually provocative way: breasts thrust forward, head pointing submissively downwards, thumbs resting inside her underwear, and legs stretched apart as she kneels on what is intended to look like bed sheets. The dominant image on the page is accompanied by three other pictures of semi-naked women, so that the entire cover consists of tantalising glimpses.
The cover sends out strong sexual messages, and even the mock prudishness of a subtitle covering the naked breasts of one of the women only enhance the thrill. The football headline – much smaller, of course, than the main sexual item – locks in the sense that this is a magazine for men, and that the women are therefore there only to serve the men.
But it is the prominent title of the leading article that is the most degrading of all. Kardashian, it announces – twice – is their "hot 101 winner", the "hottest woman in the world". By ranking, rating and judging women on their appearance, this magazine objectifies and degrades women. Not only are women presented as only being of interest sexually, but their value is reduced to a number.
Women are sexualised and objectified and, on the evidence of the pictures on this cover, they are happy to be so. And therein lies the danger of the blurred boundary between fantasy and reality. Girls and women cannot and should not be expected to emulate these images in order to be valued. We are already seeing the social consequences of these prevalent and pervasive expectations: levels of lack of body confidence have soared in recent years, as have eating disorders and sexual crimes against women.
Kardashian is financially astute, and will, we can imagine, have been paid well for her photo shoot. But images like this, especially repeated, ubiquitous images, create a damaging downward spiral. We have so grown used to these poses, reproduced as they are on covers even of many a "women's magazine", and mimicked on endless Facebook profiles, many of them by very young girls, that we expect them and accept them unquestioningly. All of this is doing untold psychological damage; we need to take stock of what we are inflicting on our young people.
- This front cover, sexualises Kim Kardashian, she is wearing expensive lingerie, which shows the status she holds. The colours are very rich and elegant, it announces – twice – is their "hot 101 winner" she is referred as being the "hottest woman in the world". Literally by ranking, rating and judging women on their appearance, this magazine objectifies and degrades women's standings. Women are portrayed as being of interest sexually, but the value they hold is reduced to a number, they have no standing and aren't dominant. This is all down to the fact, that they hold no control in society and they're always controlled by dominant men.
One of the best examples of a problematic use of transmedia storytelling is the reality television franchise Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which is rapidly turning an entire cable channel's programming into highly aggressive branding and corporate synergy in a way that exploits fan practices, eschews creative storytelling, and instead focuses on media saturation and product placement supported by loosely scripted stock plotlines.
That reality franchise bears further scrutiny, not least because it is also a key instance of a channel profiting from participatory fan culture. It does so in part by manipulating narrative and thematic elements. These include the reality show practice of turning real people into stereotypical types, what I have elsewhere analyzed as "character narratives," where cast members are portrayed as story "types" starring in elaborate story lines shaped by the rhythms of fictional TV genres, such as sitcoms, soap operas, or dramas (Edwards, 2004).
Reality television reverses classic narrative. Instead of trying to make characters seem real, it makes real people into characters, using predictable and repetitive narrative frames. The E! Kardashian franchise involves a planned multi-platform text in the sense that each additional text contributes to the whole but can stand alone, and each takes the story of this family's life into a specific media environment in order to further the story and communicate with fans. In a striking piece of transmedia storytelling as corporate synergy, the E! network often uses their nightly entertainment news program, E! News Live, to interview Kardashian castmembers and to recirculate entertainment news about the show, which functions as quite aggressive marketing for the program (with news host Ryan Seacrest, media mogul and prolific reality TV developer, notably serving as one of the program's executive producers). The reality show has generated successful spin-offs (Khloé and Lamar and Kourtney and Kim Take New York, a continuation of Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami).
Kim, Kourtney, Khloe Kardashian became the faces of QuickTrim weight loss system, and since then filing of the false advertising lawsuit, the Kardashians don't appear to be concerned about the efficacy of the product, but yet they claim that since they are not the retailers or manufacturers of the QuickTrim products, and merely spokespeople for the rpoducts, they should be removed from the lawsuit. Based upon the allegations in the complain, the Kardashians are more than mere spokespeople for the product "They personify the product" in order words. This shows how they want to own what they do, and as it shows that they want to be removed, it shows they aren't all about the fame.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=I1zXvFbjXYYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA135&dq=keeping+up+with+the+kardashians&ots=8pw3j0BA1X&sig=lm4LsEk4tQ6i3dh99nYwh5fX5PI#v=onepage&q=keeping%20up%20with%20the%20kardashians&f=false - book about the Kardashians - Family values The voice of the Kardashians
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1987222
The Kardashian family undeniably exploits three emerging commercial components: reality television, social media, and brand endorsement. Fans do not have to wait to watch Kourtney & Kim Take New York on Sunday night to find out what is going on with their favorite Kardashian; all of the Kardashians constantly update their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Kim Kardashian has over six million fans on Facebook, and over nine million followers on Twitter.A Facebook post reading ―Hi-Lights and hair cut! I‘m good to go! garnered 6,534 likes and 991 comments. It comes as no surprise that Kim Kardashian can command up to $25,000 to mention a product or brand in a tweet. In fact all of the Kardashians have ―Twitter clauses‖ in their contracts, requiring them to discuss the product or brand on their respective Twitter pages. Like the Kardashians, advertisers are also attempting to connect with consumers through social media, reality television, and other non-traditional forms of advertising.
Americans receive more than 3,000 commercial images every day. A person‘s subconscious can record approximately 150 images, and only about thirty will reach the person‘s conscious mind, and advertisers are willing to go to extremes to find ways to cut through the clutter. For many years advertisers have relied on celebrity endorsements to reach their audience‘s conscious mind. Celebrity endorsements are a type of brand communication in which a celebrity aligns herself with a product or brand and ―certifies the brand‘s claim and position by extending his/her personality, popularity, stature in the society or expertise in the field to the brand. Generally, the success of the endorsement depends on the strength of the match between the celebrity and the brand. The strength of the match depends on four factors:
Americans receive more than 3,000 commercial images every day. A person‘s subconscious can record approximately 150 images, and only about thirty will reach the person‘s conscious mind, and advertisers are willing to go to extremes to find ways to cut through the clutter. For many years advertisers have relied on celebrity endorsements to reach their audience‘s conscious mind. Celebrity endorsements are a type of brand communication in which a celebrity aligns herself with a product or brand and ―certifies the brand‘s claim and position by extending his/her personality, popularity, stature in the society or expertise in the field to the brand. Generally, the success of the endorsement depends on the strength of the match between the celebrity and the brand. The strength of the match depends on four factors:
- trustworthiness or credibility of the celebrity
- likeability of the celebrity
- similarity between the celebrity and the target audience
- expertise of the celebrity in the subject matter of the product
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Mg6CUJP23E4C&dq=kardashians&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hCKKUuD2Maaw7Abqp4DgDw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA
Kardashian Konfidential: New! Inside Kim's Wedding with Never-Seen Pix, Plus a New Chapter!
This book highlights many different factors, such as:
- What it’s really like to have a Momager
- The beauty tip that we think is an absolute MUST!
- The Peaks and Pits of our lives...so far
- What we think about men, and the absolute most important man in our lives
- Our private language: Bible!
- How to do what you love—the way we do!
- What you don't know about Kim's wedding
This book covers all the aspects of how it all began, and all the troubles Kim has faced.
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