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Abstract
The dissertation looks at the talkshow, infotainment, and the practice of audience participation. The study finds the audience participation talkshow productively adapted to a welter of postmodern conditions: incoherence, contingency, performativity, pastiche, contradiction, simulation--to name a few.
Written under the direction of Professors Robert Sklar, Robert Stam, and William Boddy, with William Simon and Richard Allen as readers, the study is a critical appreciation of the radio and television talk genres from the aesthetic, institutional, historical, discursive, intertextual, and reception standpoints linked through postmodern theory. Methodologically, this multiplicity of approach fits a genre that, like its postmodern spectatorial-participatory subject, is shifting and multiple, caught in a nexus of forces, motives, and rhetorics.
The audience participation talkshow is a hybrid form that productively incorporates a host of discursive modes, social accents, and pro-conversational material in an aesthetic of accumulation which, at the same time, disentrenches the very medium it uses. In this sense, the talkshow "has it both ways." Positioning itself as more "real" and effective in its interactive inscription of the spectator, the participatory talkshow aspires to go beyond spectacle to become the quintessential paraphenomenon--parasocial (in its relation to the spectator), paratextual and parasitic (in its promotion and use of media intertexts), and finally, paratactical (in its pastiche-like conjunction of topics, guests, experts, and participants from day to day).
In so being, the interactive talkshow--along with other hybrid, infotainment forms--embodies the broadcast industry's recombinatory attempt to reassert its programming power during the unstable production and reception conditions of the 1980s, thus re-commodifying what the culturalists called the "active," resistant spectator through greater interactivity. Close readings of "Geraldo," "The Frank Rizzo Show," "The Morton Downey, Jr. Show," and the 1989 organizing of radio talkhosts--following analyses of early talk shows and the "talk" about the talkshow so critical in constructing the genre--reveal the broadcast industry's productive instability as a postmodern dynamic explaining the genre's causation, utility, and perceived effects.
