15

The Production of Mediated Performance

Espen Ytreberg

Today it has become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences to hold that the communicative actions of humans in social settings can be likened to performances. Theories of performance call our attention to the fact that performing is a basic aspect of social life, insinuating itself even into the ostensibly most real and authentic behaviors. Performance is, in effect, endemic to human communication. If we allow this for communication in general, it should be warranted to say the same of communication through the media, since media performance could be seen as a subset, a particular species of communicative performance. The performances of hosts, interviewers, reporters, and stars have clear similarities to the performances we all get up to in everyday settings that do not involve media. One might say of both that they are “formal,” “informal,” or “intimate,” for instance. At the same time, it also seems plausible to say that communicating through the media makes a difference to communicative performance. We cannot all perform the ways in which talk-show hosts can; and the ways in which talk-show hosts perform, say, “being informal” may not be the same as the ways in which we perform it. After all, media performances come about in circumstances that are quite different from those of everyday communicative performances. The latter are typically spontaneous products of a relatively nonhierarchical setting, whereas the former are, as a rule, comprehensively planned and hierarchically organized.

Combining media production studies with insights from the study of performance is the subject of this chapter; and I mean possible insights as well as real ones, since there is no such thing as an established area of research into the production of media performance. What we have, roughly speaking, is a number of instances within the tradition of media production studies in which researchers have incorporated ideas and observations about performance. This work of incorporation can be placed within a wider agenda of media studies: an agenda that pays heed to the drive for an integrated approach to media production and media texts. The next section, on research strands, starts by accounting for this drive, looking into why and how production studies researchers turned their attention first to texts and then to media performances. Then research on media performances is considered in greater depth; such research is conducted within news production studies and influenced by perspectives from the humanities. Next to it comes a strand of research into media production that has combined sociology and linguistics. Here particular attention is paid to the formative influence of Erving Goffman's late work on the production of performances inside and outside the media. Goffman is also important to the present chapter for his seminal argument for a generalized use of the concept of “performance.”¹ All situations of co-presence with others, writes Goffman, require us to adjust our behaviors. And this goes not only for “theatrical” situations and for planned forms of behavior; even daily situations of an informal, ordinary, or intimate nature require us to take on certain roles and to stick to them as the social scenario implicit in them requires. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman famously argued that performance includes “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” (Goffman, 1990, p. 32).

After the review of research strands that have developed from roughly the late 1980s until today, the section on four fields of inquiry introduces and exemplifies some key fields of research. This section draws mainly on the author's own research on non-fictional television and other forms of broadcasting over the last 20 years (Ytreberg 1999, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008). A conceptual framework is used that builds on the basic premise that media production can be seen as a set of particularly comprehensive plannings of communicative performance, by means of modern forms of technology and organization. Here media performances are seen as the combined result of planning techniques (for instance through various scripts and logistical procedures) and performance techniques (for instance through various body and memory practices). The chapter offers analytical illustrations that focus on the nuts and bolts of how performances in media production concretely come about.

The concluding section discusses how the production of media performance relates to wider issues of society and personhood. Here the focus shifts back from a predominantly empirical level to a predominantly conceptual one. A basic fact about the great majority of media performances is that strong forces lie behind them that have demands on and stakes in the performer. There is the editorial team above the line, the technological operators below the line, and the management team in the media organization. At a more general level, there are forces of society that define what one might call a communicative climate of dominant and preferred behaviors. These all wield power over the performer. They contribute to shaping performances and – in time – to shaping the performing individuals as well.

Production of Mediated Performance: Research Strands

Media studies has become established as a loose federation of subdisciplines that have come to pursue research agendas relatively independent of each other.² Media production studies have largely concentrated on issues intrinsic to production teams and organizations – such as journalist–owner relationships, professionalization, gate-keeping, and questions of creativity versus constraint. These issues are, of course, important and valid; but, even if media production processes are worth studying in their own right, it makes limited sense to divorce them from one of their core purposes, namely that of generating communications that are able to capture an audience.

This state of affairs changed roughly from the early 1990s on, as media production studies incorporated a broader range of insights from the humanities. There was a particular interest in the way media production crucially involves understanding and putting to use conventions of mediatized representation. The insight that media production importantly involves knowing how to construct and tell a story led to production reserarch that was sociological but also drew on narrative theories and analyses (e.g., Bird & Dardenne, 1988; Jacobs, 1996; Schudson, 1995). Media production could also be said to involve a construction of genres (e.g., Bruun, 2010; Ekström, 2002), of aesthetics (e.g., Born, 1993; Caldwell, 1995), and of formats (e.g., Ytreberg, 2004). Common to all of these research contributions is a view of production as vitally involving meaning-making and communicative conventions. Producing media is seen as centrally a matter of understanding the requirements of such conventions and of putting them to use in production, in the process conforming to them, adjusting them, and occasionally also challenging them.

A key aspect of this development in media production studies – and one that this chapter will develop – is the growing acknowledgment, among media researchers, that much of media production could be seen as a production of performances. Analyses relying on a notion of communicative output as “text” tended to work with notions of textual structure that did not leave much room for considering people's bodily appearance and actions. Also, the importation of the notion of “text” from literary studies into media studies contributed to an emphasis on language and to a corresponding lack of attention to auditive and visual aspects of communication in media. The result was a tendency toward disembodiment in analysis. Insofar as actual persons and bodies were considered, they were routinely subordinated, as “functions” of some narrative or generic sets of requirements. As a consequence, not much was made of the myriad movements, looks, postures, gestures, and comportments that fill our screens.

Performing Journalistic Authority

An important early move toward performance in media production studies was provided by Barbie Zelizer from within the tradition of journalism research. As part of a “humanistic inquiry into journalism” (Zelizer, 1993), she proposed looking into the established research area of journalistic power by using other tools than those traditionally offered to journalism studies by mainstream social science traditions. Power is not just a matter of one person intentionally producing effects on other persons, Zelizer argued, but also a matter of providing the basic frameworks for action and representation. Following the work of performance theorists such as Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, Zelizer proposed to deal with the communicative actions of journalists via a “performance frame”: “When seen as performance, news is understood as a situationally variant process [. . .] this frame may turn out to be particularly useful for considering journalism” (ibid., p. 82).³

In several publications from the early 1990s (Zelizer 1990a, 1990b, 1993), Zelizer explored issues of power and performance via the case of journalistic authority. Clearly, the authority of journalism is communicated through the personal authority of journalists' performances. Equally clearly, this authority is not, primarily, a product of the individual journalists but of larger, collective entities – such as the institution of journalism and broadcasting organizations. Somehow the authority of, for instance, a BBC news bulletin rests both on its being recognizably a work of professional journalism and on that public service broadcaster's output. Here the performers must carry a heavy load, embodying and acting out key virtues such as credibility, objectivity, and authority.

Such performances require effective and seamless sets of conventions. The authority structures of broadcast news had been analyzed before Zelizer's work. Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley (1978), for example, noted a clear and uniform hierarchy of authority in studio-based news broadcasts, the anchorperson being at the apex. From the desk in the studio, the anchorperson connects the viewer to the world and connects the persons in the news to the world and to each other. Various combinations of conventions – direct camera address, logo superpositions, set phrases such as “here is the evening news with NN” – combine to establish the anchorperson's authority. At regular intervals, the authority of the anchorperson is delegated to reporters on location or to experts – but only in part, and only for the duration of one news item. A further hierarchy of authority is established between reporters and the people who are in the news either because they are personally affected or because they witnessed the events covered. These people do not come to address the news audience; they only address reporters, and they do so only by way of answering questions. Broadcast journalism's conventions are set up so as to make sure that the journalistic authority always intercedes between the people in the news and the people in the audience.

This positioning requires that journalists assume personal responsibility for finding and telling the story. Zelizer is interested in – and she looks at – how such a personal assumption of authorship and authority is concretely achieved. For a number of reasons, the journalist may not be as close to the news event as the assumption of authorship and authority suggests. Journalists routinely rely on satellite relays, wire services, and different types of second-hand reports of a news event. Zelizer argues that journalistic authority rests on a set of routinized journalistic conventions for asserting proximity or for creating the impression of being personally close to the news, regardless of whether the journalist actually is close or not. Journalistic proximity “emerges as much from organizational practices which lend an illusion of proximity as from the actual nearness of a journalist to an event” (Zelizer, 1990b, p. 38). Zelizer pursues this illusion of proximity in qualitative analyses of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) evening newscasts that focus particularly on the role of anchorpersons. She finds a set of “presentational practices” that are used throughout to assert proximity between the news event, the journalist, and the broadcast. The so-called “slugs,” or identifications, do much of this work. A formulaic slug such as “Bill Plante. CBS News. The White House” manages to unite the three parties symbolically in a matter of seconds (1990b, p. 41). The effect is particularly interesting in cases where the journalist is physically far removed from the news event. Zelizer discussed the case of a report introduced through the name of the reporter, but without identification of place. The report then introduces the scene of the news event – Boston – but omits information on the location of the reporter who narrates in voice-over. A sense of connection between reporter and place is thus established indirectly. Only after the report is the reporter's location disclosed – for example, “Lesley Stahl. CBS. Washington.” Thus a performance of symbolic proximity, in the absence of physical proximity, works to establish journalistic authority.

Production and Participation Frameworks

By focusing on how production is shaped by the requirements of texts and performances, Zelizer and other sociologists of media production have been able to demonstrate the importance of collective interpretations and representational practices to media production. They have been less concerned with how the production of performance can be related to roles and functions in the production process. This has been done in a strand of work that originates with the sociologist Erving Goffman and has been taken up primarily by researchers with a strong interest in the interface between sociology and linguistics.

Goffman's work on what he called the “production format” of performative utterances was formulated in terms of a general theory of communication. It is worth noting that Goffman's prime example was that of broadcast communication.⁴ In several late works (1974; 1981a; 1981b), Goffman proposed to divide the production roles according to the share that different parties have in the performance. He suggested that a production format is the result of a certain constellation of “originating,” “authoring,” and “animating” an utterance. The “animator” is the visible and audible body in performance, which brings scripts and plans to life in a communicative act. The “author” puts together the words and other concrete features of the performance. The “originator” is the entity whose views and positions are represented in the performance. In everyday interactions outside of the media, one individual will typically take care of all these roles. For example, the person who utters “Hi Judy, nice day” upon meeting a friend is also the person who composes the words and whose point of view is being expressed.

Media production systematically splits these roles among a number of people by means of organizational hierarchies and divisions of labor. Management originates, scriptwriters author, and performers animate. In traditional high-prestige newscasts, formality and a certain de-individualization signal the fact that an author of considerable prestige is “speaking through” the animator. Talk shows, on the other hand, feature hosts who seem to come up with what is said by virtue of their innate verbal prowess, then and there. Not only animating, but also authoring and originating seem to emanate from them. In broadcast communication, this embodiment is a simulation and an illusion, writes Goffman (1981b), albeit a successful one.

Research building on Goffman's concepts has tried to expand and supplement his list of roles in order to match more closely the issue of responsibility for the performance with the professions and organizational structures of media production. Writing on the production of news language, Allan Bell has proposed a number of subroles in order to flesh out Goffman's original three. An example is his suggestion that the role of editor should be distinguished from that of the author, because the latter formulates a draft text for performance, while the former modifies it (Bell, 1991, pp. 36ff; see also Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Levinson, 1988).

Goffman makes connections with production formats and actual performances both conceptually and in the analyses of concrete media performances. Conceptually, he emphasizes how the production format is closely matched with what he calls the “participant framework” of the output. It is axiomatic for Goffman that the broadcast performances of hosts and anchorpersons take place in a social situation and for various participants in the process of communication. Some participant roles involve direct participation, as when guests interact with hosts on talk shows and interviewees interact with interviewers on newscasts. In broadcast communication there are also “ratified parties” with whom communication is more indirect, primarily studio-and home-audiences. As for concrete analysis, both Goffman himself (1981b) and other researchers building on him (Brunvatne & Tolson, 2001; Clayman, 1992; Hutchby, 2006) have analyzed the ways in which performers take on the roles of animator, author, and originator. Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt (1994) have looked at the case of audience discussion programmes on TV. They point out how the psychological profession acts as a collective originator behind the utterances of expert psychologists in therapeutic talk shows. This brings to the programme a participation status that is superior in several respects to that of the lay participants. The latter participants get to report their experiences and feelings, while representatives of the profession are authorized to pass certain kinds of judgment on them. On the other hand, the lay participants gain an authenticity that is not available to experts by speaking on their own behalf and in a manner that conflates the animator, author, and originator (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994, pp. 128ff).

Research on production and participation frameworks has also looked at the often complex and subtle ways in which shifts in one framework (in what Goffman calls “footing”) are connected to shifts in another. For instance, newscasters routinely go from delivering a monologue to the home audience through direct address to camera, into a being an interviewer in a studio interview segment. The address to camera is typically scripted and places the newscaster in a formal mode that clearly signals the presence of an originator distinct from the animating newscaster. Here the newscaster's utterances will typically be characterized by high “modality,” which refers, in linguists' parlance, to the features of texts that “express speakers' and writers' attitudes toward themselves, towards their interlocutors, and towards their subject-matter” (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979, p. 200). When the newscaster shifts to interviewer mode, the performance routinely takes on a less manuscripted character. There is a subtle shift in alignment as the newscaster seems to move toward taking some share in the origination of her or his utterance questions. At the same time a subtle shift in modality takes place (as discussed in Montgomery, 2007, p. 30). The reporter is, typically, somewhat noncommittal toward the propositional content of what is being discussed, demanding a stand on the issue from the interviewee, but not taking one for her- or himself. These are fine nuances, which speak to the accomplishment of human communication and to the ways in which media have introduced yet more layers to that accomplishment. At the same time, the nuances are far from being innocent ones. The duties and entitlements of various performers in the participation framework of broadcast communication tend to be unequally distributed, an array of communicative privileges being granted to those performers who represent roles in the production framework.

Production of Mediatized Performance: Four Fields of Inquiry

The existing research on the production of media performances has been developed in fits and starts within different research environments; hence it is necessarily patchy. Important areas of study are underexpored or virtually unexplored. The following sections outline and develop four such areas of study. Three of them foreground an interest in the stages of production that are closest to the performances themselves and provide the most direct influence on them. Other common threads are the management of bodies via media technology and various kinds of scripts. A key and underlying issue is that of how media performances are, for the most part, very comprehensively planned, even if they may seem spontaneous and “fresh.” The analysis of the performance itself is not foregrounded, since the research outlined above is relatively rich in this respect.

Direction for Performances

As a rule, the planning of performances that goes on in large-scale media organizations involves media production teams both above the line (e.g., producers, writers, floor managers) and below the line (e.g., camera operators, costume designers, makeup artists). Indirectly, they also involve editorial and management levels of the organization. In various ways and to varying degrees, all these people have a stake and a hand in the performances. Thus the planning of mediatized performance routinely becomes comprehensive throughout the organization. Planning runs the whole gamut, from very concrete instructions and proddings before and during the performances themselves, to policy and strategy work that establishes underlying premises for performances.

Closest to the performance itself in terms of spatio-temporal proximity is “cueing,” or directions given to performers during and immediately adjacently to the performance. Cueing is an important part of setting up the occasion of a performance. A main long-term tendency in current non-fiction broadcast programming has been to try and avoid “staginess.” A feel for the informal, the intimate, or the authentic seems to require the avoidance of overt signs that the performer is being told how to perform. This poses at once a practical problem, since extemporized performance is harder to control. For instance, a verbatim manuscript can be timed quite accurately in advance, whereas the time of extemporaneous performance must be kept by the performer while performing.

Table 15.1 Par-i-bol, NRK1, August 28, 1992. A word table has been used here to provide an approximation of the script's layout

OPPSTART DISKUSJON/VB	DISCUSSION KICKOFF/VIDEO TAPE
Vovet	Daring
–	–
Hadde ikkje gått heime sjå'ss!	Wouldn't have worked round our place!
—	—
Er de JA eller NEI til EF	Are they for or against the EU
—	—
Et ledd i dagens NEI til EF-feiring?	A part of today's NO to EU celebration?
—	—
VB/Sengehalmen	Video tape/Bedside
. . .	. . .
ljk avslutter:	ljk rounds off:
Da må jeg avbryte. Det er tid for nyheter.	I'll have to break you off there. Time for the news.
KLOKKEN ER 22!	IT's ALMOST 22 O'CLOCK!

Source: Par-i-bol, NRK1, August 28, 1992.

Aside from cues, giving kernel information is another way to provide direction in order to control extemporaneous performance. Kernels are items of condensed information on what to say or do in a particular section of the performance. Kernels often feature in scripts, but they can take the form of memorized sentences or phrases that can be incorporated into an otherwise extemporaneous stream of talk.

Table 15.1 provides an example from a Norwegian popular journalism news and current events TV program from the early 1990s called Par-i-bol. The script was handwritten collaboratively between the two main hosts, Lottelise Folge and Lars-Jacob Krogh (ljk in the script); it was made in order to sort out their turns at talk in a segment. The sequence involved introductory information for a debate sequence on European Union membership, to be shown after a news bulletin. This particular script employs several forms of kernels for the talk, from a one-word condensation of what is to be said in turn (“Daring”) to condensed questions and statements. The bottom of the script illustrates another key means of directing the specifics of personal performances: what could be termed “turn scripting.” Turn scripting indicates who gets to talk and when. It is in use in scripting the coordinated performances of more than one person. The more detailed variants indicate each speaker's turn to talk in a sequence; this is necessary if the production is live, as well as technologically and logistically complex. However, short-hand versions seem to be more common. Some turn scripts only indicate who starts the sequence and who closes it. The framing and nomination of ratified participants involves names, titles, and other credentials, which such turn scripts are made to help the performer remember. The Par-i-bol example in Table 15.1, which covers the signing-off part of the sequence, shows both kernel and turn scripting at work. There is a nice twist in the way this “outro” (I mean, this opposite of an “intro”) actually scripts the turn to happen as an interruption from a ratified participant, with the words “I'll have to break you off there”).

The need for an extemporaneous and ongoing assembly of the performance, what Goffman (1981b, p. 227) calls “freshness,” makes it potentially awkward for the TV performer to carry around a clearly visible script during performance. The choice is either to hide it or at least to make it look inconspicuous, marginal to what is “really” going on in the performance. So a number of script-hiding devices are in use for “fresh” performances. The most technology-specific device is perhaps the teleprompter; but there are more prosaic ones, such as checking the script during off-camera breaks in the performance. A much used alternative is the helper in the stage wings of production, who cues the performer. During performance, the producer will generate reminders, for instance of time limits, and s/he may suggest lines for the performers, for instance appropriate interview questions. Most major live formats, where the logistics of performance are extremely complex and relatively unpredictable, depend heavily on this technique. Cues are made either visually, through gesticulation, or aurally, through (often wireless) microphone systems. Various conventions exist to make this effective. The producer countdown to the host during performance is one commonly employed verbal convention (“20 seconds [. . .] 10 seconds [. . .] cut now!”). The gesturing equivalent, sometimes used by producers who have eye contact with the performer, is a cut-throat hand slash. This illustrates a more general point: the professional performer is effectively communicating not just to absent audiences, but also to members of the production personnel, who are hidden in the stage wings. Broadcast communication to the audience has to be managed jointly with collusive communication back toward the production staff. Performers must be able to do this in sometimes very taxing circumstances, such as by talking to audiences while simultaneously listening to producer directions through earphones or earbuds.

Direction immediately before or during performance may be seen as the last stage in a process of teaching and learning, directly and indirectly, which starts when the performer first encounters the production team. In the case of professional performers, this process may take a number of years and is correspondingly hard for researchers to follow. A major work in this area is Laura Grindstaff's production study of daytime talk shows, The Money Shot (2002), which describes in some detail how talk-show participants are made ready for performance. The process is quite elaborate and involves a number of stages. First, contact is usually made in pre-interviews over the phone, during which production team members ask questions in order to find out not only what the prospective participants have to say, but also what their storytelling skills are and whether they have the requisite emotional appeal. Follow-up conversations give more background information and also provide a chance to do what Grindstaff calls “maintenance work” on the person's willingness to comply and perform. When participants arrive backstage before taping, there is “prepping and coaching,” reminding participants the order of events' and the format's performance requirements, as well as putting them in the right frame of mind. For daytime talk shows, this typically means encouraging participants not to hold back on emotions, to “cut loose,” and to “let it all out.” All of this direction involves a risk of producing an unwanted artifice in the performance. As Grindstaff shows, a constant conflict is involved between the need for control and the demands of a performance that has to look spontaneous and fresh:

This type of “prepping and coaching” is primarily a matter of spoken communication between guests and production team members. Still, the production of broadcast performances relies on extensive forms of written materials, particularly scripts.

Scripting Performances Outside of Talk

The word “scripting” is used in bewilderingly diverse ways in a number of traditions of academic research. This section focuses on an extended sense of the word, often used in professional literature on the media. On the one hand, it is used more or less synonymously with “manuscript” and refers to documents detailing what the performers say (for instance the kernel script described in the previous section). It follows from this use of the word that performances that do not use such manuscripts can be called “unscripted.” A different and more extensive use can be found in the literature of screenwriting manuals. Here a “script” outlines the talk of a performance, both its sequential order and its spatial settings. In this sense, a script coordinates not just the performance but also its mediatized context and time sequencing – not just the talk, but also the sounds and images (Ytreberg, 2006).⁵

Following this wider use, one can say that a script is a document, in paper or data file form, sometimes handwritten or typed, but nowadays usually computer-generated. It contains information in verbal, visual, and/or graphic form on key aspects of media performances, coordinating the work of those involved in, or affiliated with the production of, media performances. A script is prescriptive in the sense that it is basically geared toward giving direction on how future productions should be carried out. However, the registers of scripts themselves are most often matter of fact and descriptive. Perhaps most vital to media production is the main script – a standard feature in film, in broadcasting, and in the production of multimedia applications.

There are of course innumerable variations across media and genres, from shooting scripts and storyboards in film to the teleplays of television and the so-called flow charts of interactive applications. Still, most of them incorporate a timed overview of the output sequences (e.g., film scenes or news bulletins), information on what goes into every sequence (e.g., words/talk, video/audio sources), and information on handling the requisite technology (e.g., camera choices, cues). Main scripts thus contain vital information on performances, technology, and logistics; in a sense, they serve as a meeting point between the three. Manuscripts for verbal performance are usually auxiliary in relation to the main script, and they are sometimes inserted into it. Such auxiliary scripts are made to serve the specific needs and requirements of various professions involved in production. As the performer has his or her manuscript, the designer has a floor plan and the cameramen have camera shooting scripts. Only some of these scripts are used by the performers themselves; but all of them affect the performance. A main script sets the basic pace of the performance by blocking and timing a program's sequences – including its conversations, monologues, and segues. For instance, the pace and sequencing set by an evening news programme requires compressed delivery and highly formulaic segues between elements.

Scripting, then, is about far more than spoken lines; it is used to plan basic spatial and temporal parameters for the performance. This section will elaborate on one important type of script for shaping the space and the social setting of a studio: the floor plan. Figure 15.1 shows an example taken from the production of Wiese, a Norwegian prime-time soft journalism program studied in the early 1990s. This floor plan lays out a standard studio-based, multi-camera setup for cameras and their movements, pre-setting certain camera coverage options. In doing so, the floor plan also sets up the performance in a number of very concrete ways. Studio walls and passageways indicate quite precisely the space the performer has to stand in and move through (as indicated in Figure 15.1 as “café 1” and “artist scene”). These sorts of studio sets are constructed so that the performer can always be in the unobstructed, well-framed view of the camera and clearly audible via mikes, although the live broadcast involves a number of sequences in different studio subsettings. Typically sets will be constructed for the performer to move from camera to camera, sometimes by using markers on the floor, because these movements have to end up in specific places. An example to the above right of the Wiese studio plan is the “alley-way” (smuget), where the host is framed and set up to move forward, toward and along a set of static and dynamic camera options. The setup ensures continuous address to the camera and at the same time makes the performer frontally available to the viewer. When the host moves in the studio, this means that he or she will have to address one camera first and then another, with no lapse in between. The real-time address shift between cameras has become a standard device for dynamism and variation. In real-time multi-camera studio settings, such shifts between cameras frequently have to be done while the performer is moving physically. This usually requires studio rehearsals in which the performer memorizes movements and camera address shifts to a point reminiscent of the internalization used by dancers and actors.

Figure 15.1 Floor plan, Wiese, NRK1, 1992. Source: Wiese, NRK1, 1992.

In recent television production, the traditional division between constructing a social setting in the studio and registering what happens in a preexisting (“location”) setting has become increasingly blurred. The production of a live major event tends to take place in a setting that is so media-saturated that it comes to resemble a studio-type situation, even if its rationale is still tied to the ongoings of an outside world. This is the case, for example, with major sports events, in which the stadium or arena is increasingly occupied by sound and camera equipment, and in which the event spaces themselves are lined up, angled, and proportioned for this coverage. There are also ancillary spaces specifically for the mediation of the event, such as the setting of the post-race soundbyte, or the studio-in-the-stands, where hosts, experts, and athletes meet up to preview and review the event itself.

The reality show Big Brother, an internationally successful format generated from the first Dutch version in 1999, also famously extends this tendency in sometimes drastic ways. It is an extreme, hence instructive, case of how comprehensively current television can set up performances by scripting social settings. Television in this case builds from scratch a social setting that contains the performer's whole life, at least for a number of weeks. Audiences know that this type of reality program may include even the most private parts of everyday life (e.g., slander, sex, drunkenness). Yet few people know how the scripting of ordinary people's lives is actually managed. Several important forms of scripting for the production of Big Brother provide interesting leads. One is the “technical plan.” All versions of this format build from scratch a “Big Brother bunker” where the participants are locked in for the duration of the competition.

Figure 15.2 Floor plan with camera setup, Norwegian Big Brother, TVNorge, 2001. Source: Norwegian Big Brother, TVNorge, 2001.

The combined building layout and camera plan shown in Figure 15.2, as well as other information on Norwegian Big Brother's production, are taken from Anders Lindstad's master thesis on the 2001 series of Norwegian Big Brother (Lindstad, 2003). In practical terms, the Big Brother social setting is a container built to house the apartment and multi-camera production facilities. Following a sort of reverse panopticon principle, the participants' living area is surveilled by a ring of cameras and microphones (which supplement the participants' body microphones). As indicated on the Big Brother technical plan, the camera setup combines automatic surveillance-type roof cameras and cameras hidden behind one-way mirrors (shown in separate rooms marked “Kam” in Figure 15.2). There are also mini-cameras, for instance one in the bathroom (shown in the lower left on the plan), which is mounted on the shower head. Not indicated on the plan are a number of roof-mounted microphones designed to supplement each participant's body microphone.

Figure 15.2 shows a comprehensive and professionally challenging production setup: the production team needs not just to expose rudimentarily what is going on, but also to disentangle the specifics of who is saying and doing what to whom, in a room that is often crowded with participants. Basic production techniques like the match-on-action shot and the foregrounding of relevant sound sources become quite difficult when there is no script to dictate these ensemble performances.

The scripting of Big Brother's social setting attempts to contain the uncertainties over what participants will say and do by making possible an extensive ritualization of domestic life. The bunker living area more or less has a typical apartment room layout, with spaces for social interaction: the sofa sectionals, the dinner table, the kitchen bench and table, the backyard. However, these are also the spaces for a series of ritualized actions imposed by the production team; voting ceremonies, contests, and various assignments are introduced to keep the participants active and the social interaction going. The sofa arrangement doubles as a setting for the regular voting out of participants. The backyard doubles as the site for assignments of a more physical nature. This, then, is a private house setting, the traditional arena for relaxation, layered over with competitions and ceremonies that are anything but relaxing. The private home is a prime site for authentic communication, since it is conventionally associated with individualized and “fresh” performances. Still, the scripting of Big Brother's social setting makes it possible to overlay the home setting with a steady stream of competitive rituals. This has the effect of making even an amateur performance without a manuscript into something that is still scripted and, hence, considerably more controlled and predictable.

Policies for Performances

The scripting of talk and of the spatio-temporal parameters of performance impacts the performer in very direct and concrete ways. Some aspects of production have a more indirect impact, which is still important. “Policy” in this section refers to overall guidelines for outputs that are provided or overseen by a media organization's management. Policies seldom focus on specific performances. Still, a number of policy decisions and documents are salient to performance. The connection is perhaps most evident in formats that are built around individuals. Here the whole realization of a production hinges on managing to sign “talent,” someone around whose performance track record the format will be built. One may also include in the policy category certain documents that provide overall guidelines for performances and their mediation. Examples of such guidelines in television include the format “bible,” which is a reference document used to plan and standardize key features of a television series. The bible is an important part of the buying and selling of format rights, which is usually a policy-level decision (see also Chapter 12, this volume). This section examines how policy-related documents guide performances in broadcasting organizations.

Reality TV format bibles are interesting for the quite extensive ways in which they plan performances. They offer a kind of main script, in that they convert the inherent time structures of certain rituals (a voting, a competition) into chronologically timed and sequentially blocked units. Format bibles in reality TV are hard for the researcher to come by, but they seem to be strongly focused around temporal unfolding, explaining it in considerable detail. There are good reasons for this; not only the time structure of the programme series, but also the logistic and technological challenges of its production follow largely from the basic ritualizations that the format requires.

Figure 15.3 is an excerpt from the format bible to the American reality programme No Boundaries (2002), a contest involving trekking-type challenges and a voting out procedure designed to eliminate gradually everyone but the winner. Excerpted is page 7 of a 61-page bible that is structured almost in its entirety as a chronological run-through of the competition's stages and various rituals. The excerpt shows how the bible outlines not just the basic rituals of the competition itself, but also attendant rituals, such as the evening campfire get-together. It indicates some key features of the performances, as well as key modes of participant behavior (such as “resting,” “jockeying,” and being “out of the comfort zone”). Given that the reality genre imposes a taboo on manuscripts, it is presumably difficult to plan just how much jockeying will happen. Cameramen will have to go with the flow of what happens, and this is difficult. Hence the tendency, in these types of format, to stage events and actions that the cameras would not capture the first time around. However, it counts for a lot in terms of practical production that jockeying will happen – or that something will happen that can be interpreted as jockeying. The cameramen will be in the right place, set up and ready to capture what is, ostensibly, about to occur naturally.

Figure 15.3 Format bible excerpt, No Boundaries, Outdoor Life Network, 2002. Source: No Boundaries, Outdoor Life Network, 2002.

The “personalities” of the main performers are basic to the appeal of many genres in the electronic media. Therefore they are dealt with on an overall policy level. Some quite extensive examples are found in fictional genres such as the soap opera and popular drama series. Here it has been a common (although variable) practice for the main scriptwriter to write up the basic characteristics and the biography of key characters. A team of scriptwriters then turns these basic characteristics into actions and lines in individual episodes. In comparison, non-fiction scripting seems on the whole to be less comprehensive. Bibles and format handbooks will often contain a description of the ideal characteristics of hosts and other participants, but rarely in very concrete or detailed terms. Still, the production of many non-fiction formats involves the formulation and deployment of a policy for cultivating performers' personality characteristics. This typically goes on in seminar-type settings, when production teams break off from the daily schedule to take stock. Seminars will often involve the producers writing memos to be distributed subsequently. The memos provide a more or less authorized view of how the format and its performances need to be reformulated or adjusted.

These memos may provide a sort of ideal description of the format's key personalities. Table 15.2 is an excerpt from such a memo, providing someting of a recipe for a certain type of host's performance. It was written by the heads of the production team, when they made the youth radio current affairs program Mamarazzi. An observation study of the production of Mamarazzi (Ytreberg, 2002, 2004) observed that this memo did matter to production staff, although it was not referred to on a daily basis. The memo did not seem to function like a recipe or a checklist; rather it provided a background reminder and a fleshing-out of what the basic premises for production were. The production team's allegiance to the basic values described above, such as genuineness and realness, was a more or less unanimous and taken-for-granted thing. The memo's function was to remind performers of key considerations that were already ingrained in consciousness. It reminded the members, in the last instance, of how to be when they were in performance mode: genuine, personal, critical, and so on. One might say the memo was ultimately concerned with cultivating a certain kind of performer, maybe even a certain kind of person. The formation of a professional performer is a time-consuming thing, however. It is obviously not something that can be accomplished via one script or via one instance of media production. A longer process of training is involved.

Table 15.2 Memo, Mamarazzi, P3, 2000. A word table has been used here to provide an approximation of the script's layout

PROGRAMLEDERNE I MAMARAZZI:	THE MAMARAZZI HOSTS:
Skal være ekte, men ikke selvhøytidelige Skal være personlige, men ikke pinlig private Skal være kritiske, men ikke ondskapsfulle Skal være fandenivoldske, men sympatiske Skal være hovedpersoner, men ikke på bekostning av gjestene Skal være underholdende, men ikke flåsete	Should be genuine, but not full of themselves Should be personal, but not embarrassingly private Should be critical, but not mean-spirited Should be gung-ho but sympathetic Should play a main part, but not at the guests' expense Should be entertaining, but not flippant
GJESTENE I MAMARAZZI:	THE MAMARAZZI GUESTS:
Skal være virkelige De er ikke rollefigurer – de skal ikke late som om de er noen andre enn det de er. Lytterne skal tro på dem. Skal være midtpunktet under samtalen Selv om programmet er programleder-sentrert, er inviterte gjester midtpunktet i studio og i lytternes ører. [. . .]	Should be real They are not actors – they should not pretend to be someone they are not. The listener must believe in them. Should be the center of attention during conversations Even though the programme is host-centered, invited guests are the center of attention in the studio and in the listeners' ears. [. . .]

Source: Mamarazzi, P3, 2000.

Training for Performance

Media performances require various forms of performer competence. One such competence is the ability to commit elements of the performance to memory; another is the facility to produce a stream of reliable talk under demanding conditions. Manuscripts can take care of some of this, but not all of it. Performances such as those of disc jockeys (DJs), of talk-show hosts, and of sports commentators simply contain too much talk, and they need to sound fresh and spontaneous. Hence performers tend to rely on internalized formulae. Researchers have noticed interesting similarities between media broadcast performances and the performances of oral poetry and other premodern forms. They are all highly dependent on various types of formulas, set phrases, and expressions learned by heart and with the aid of rhythm and music. A formula is “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea,” according to the oral tradition scholar Milman Parry (cited in Lord, 1960, p. 30).

Paddy Scannell and Graham Brand (1991) have pointed out that broadcast performances also routinely require that a repertoire of set phrases and other formulas for talk are built up so as to be available on instant call. In the case of radio DJs, extemporaneous speech must be kept up in stretches of several hours. But the introduction of new technologies of communication also changes performance; this general point is emphasized by the communication historian Walter Ong (1971, 1988), for whom changes in media technology are the watershed between the oral and the literate world. The introduction of writing means that instructions can be written down, codified, and made more permanent. In this way the formula can be imposed on the performer through an external trigger. Thus writing enables a more intense scrutiny of performers and a more comprehensive manipulation of them. In modern large-scale media, this routinely happens through elaborate forms of training for performance – by way of dedicated courses and various other kinds of training.

Training for the purpose of seeming informal on the screen produces a performance that resembles, but is not the same as, everyday informality. To use Ong's vocabulary from his seminal Orality and Literacy (1988), the orality afforded by electronic media is “secondary,” in the sense that it is based on writing practices in production. It deals, paradoxically, with the “planning of unplanned events” (Ong, 1971, p. 285). Extemporaneous performances in the media, then, may have a fresh feel to them, but this will be the result of a very different process from everyday informal talk. Among other things, quite extensive training goes into handling the technology and the scripts so as to make it possible to extemporize in circumstances that are likely to make the untrained fall silent. Further, there is always a need for editors and management to ensure that performers are reliable. Hence the formalization and professionalization of performance training has become common in modern large-scale media. There are even some formal educational programs for becoming a host or a news presenter; these are available both in media organizations and in universities.

The practices of training for professional performances have not yet been much studied, but should present a rich area of inquiry for those interested in how media performances are produced. Again, a possible starting point is Goffman's (1981b) analysis of how the “freshness” of the professionally trained broadcaster differs from everyday behaviors in non-mediatized settings. The broadcast performance is more correct and more fluent than everyday performances, Goffman argues, but it secures a “fresh” feel by using a repertoire of set phrases. When slips and falterings occur, professional performers have the ability to regain control and fluency in a way others do not. Broadcast performers, as a rule, stick to the requirements of format and genre. Whereas performers in informal interpersonal communication enjoy a lot of leeway to segue loosely from the informal to the formal and back, a talk-show host must stick reliably to informality. As Goffman puts it in the case of station announcers who seek to combine their scripted and informal performances:

The process of training for these competences is a process of adjusting one's personal communicative repertoire. Becoming a news presenter means that one must suppress the effervescent traits of one's personality and boost the restrained traits. Becoming a reality TV participant often requires the opposite adjustment. Whatever the ratio between suppression and boosting, there is clearly an augmentation of an individual's communicative repertoire for the purposes of media performance. Such augmentation of individuality has been described quite succinctly by one broadcaster interviewed by researchers Andrew Tolson and Catherine Roberts:

Not surprisingly, such boosting of oneself is emphasized in television production but the need for self-suppression is not, since the latter is harder to square with ideals of authenticity. Ostensibly it is one's “true self” that gets augmented in this way. As Tolson (2001) has argued, however, appeals to such true selves become problematic in media settings that seem to impose their own frameworks for defining what that self actually is.

Performance, Identity, and Society

So far, performances have been looked at from the standpoint of production. Much has been made of the ways in which mediatized performances are extensively marked by the processes of planning, logistics, and technology management that lie behind them. Still, a focus placed exclusively on these specifics of media production will not explain performance fully. At least two further factors should be brought in: individuality, and society. The individual clearly brings to media production something that matters: an already developed communicative repertoire and an already formed sense of self. The trajectory of training and adaptation to production then seems to make some marked differences to that performer, extending perhaps to his or her very sense of self. As for society, it has been pointed out above, in some detail, how media production involves considerable forces that stand behind the performer, so to speak, and act on performance. These forces are a feature not only of individual media institutions, but also of the institutional structure of contemporary society. So the power wielded over the media performances that was discussed in this chapter could be seen as a particular instance of how power is wielded over performances in society more generally.

The close monitoring and extensive planning of performances is by no means specific to today's media institutions. A number of important research contributions from the social and human sciences suggest that, on the contrary, this is a widespread feature of institutional communication in contemporary Western society. It seems particularly prominent in the service sector. Deborah Cameron (2000) has documented the extensive monitorings and disciplinings that call center operators are subjected to. Arlie Hochschild (1983) has investigated how air hostesses are trained by their employer organizations to internalize and discipline certain forms of emotion in performance. Speaking more broadly of postwar Western culture, the performance theorist Jon McKenzie (2001, p. 55) has observed that we routinely speak of organizations' abilities to “perform.” He sees in this an expansion of the performance concept whereby it comes to be associated with management, with demands of review and of efficiency. Following Michel Foucault (1977), one might say that the power exerted over media performance is an instance of more general processes of surveillance in modern societies whereby organizations exert power over bodies and over individuality. Although Foucault's preferred example is the prison, he investigates some much more general organizational procedures. Modern organizations are about systematic and exhaustive training, about “meticulously controlling the operations of the body,” as Foucault (1977, p. 137) puts it. Discipline here does not imply particular kinds of restrained or formal behavior. The discipline of a talk-show host, for instance, is evidenced in an ability to be reliably and consistently informal, jokey, and effusive. It does mean that a very extensive regime of training is imposed on the individual by an organization. In media, this is the training designed to make one cope with technology, with the logistics of plans and scripts, with format and genre requirements.

Society and individuality are inextricably linked in Foucault's work. Over time, he argues, the systematic and pervasive character of training in modern organizations heavily involves the individuality of the disciplined person. “Other-discipline” is imposed by the organization, and comes to work in concert with “self-disciplining” processes, through which individuals strive to become what is expected of them. According to Foucault, these disciplining processes quite simply come to constitute individuality:

This famously uncompromising view of how organizations constitute individuals contrasts starkly with some strong notions of performance and of the performer within the media industries themselves. Industry practitioners tend to argue that success on screen hinges first and foremost on the performers' ability to “be themselves” and precisely not to “play a role,” “put on an act,” or otherwise adapt their behavior to the production apparatus. As a Norwegian TV producer puts it: “You can't play a programme host. You have to be a programme host” (Ytreberg, 1999, p. 220). In this type of industry account, the necessary natural charisma is often seen to be possessed only by the chosen few, which serves to justify the exclusivity of being a media “personality.” The television writer, performer, and critic Clive James (1983, p. 174) has maintained, with studied arrogance, that “all you have to do on television is be yourself, always provided that you have a self to be.”⁶ In this type of account, some just “have it,” others just don't.

It seems reasonable to say that the truth about how professionalism in performance comes about may lie between these extremes. However, a media production researcher will want to gain a more precise grasp of the ways in which the individuality of persons is put at stake in media's production of performance. In conceptual terms, a main contribution from research on media has been the concept of “persona.” Reflecting, in 1956, on the then new television medium, Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl defined the persona as a “special category of ‘personalities’ whose existence is a function of the media themselves” (Horton & Wohl, 2006, p. 2). The two authors go on to describe the persona as making a similar impression on the television viewer as a friend or family member would do – that is, the impression of someone intimate and familiar. Several decades before the subfield of media production studies existed, Horton and Wohl made the connection between media performance and the requirements of media production: “[The performer] has the peculiar virtue of being standardized according to the ‘formula’ for his character and performance which he and his managers have worked out and embodied in an appropriate ‘production format’” (ibid., p. 35).

Horton and Wohl tended to speak of personae as an artificial construct that bore little resemblance to the performer's identity and behavior outside media settings. However, a closer look at production practices (which Horton and Wohl did not provide) may suggest that a clear distinction between persona and identity is difficult to draw. This chapter has used the phrase “augmentation of individuality” to describe a gradual process of training and internalization for media performance. Personality augmentation is a process that builds on the performers' prior identities, basic communicative competencies, and talents. The readying for mediatized performance involves, then, the cultivation of some personality traits and the suppression of others by production members of staff who work according to the norms and procedures discussed in this chapter. The process is a very concrete and practical one, involving literally innumerable performances, both in simulated training and in actual performance situations. The performer gradually develops and internalizes a repertoire of set phrases, but also a repertoire of appropriate sounds such as brief laughs, poignant pauses, and continuers (e.g., “uh huh”) that help conversation along. There are also set looks, postures, gestures, movements, and mimicry. A working knowledge of complex technologies is required, along with a finely developed ability to micro-manage the body in time and space.

The routine result of this performance work is a persona that is demonstrably different from the individual person who first entered a production setting, although it is related to and it builds on that person. This chapter has emphasized how research helps us understand the nature and extent of such differences. It has also argued that the process of producing media performances involves the extertion of power, and in doing so it has suggested that conflicts are involved. As has been mentioned, media industry discourse often downplays issues of power and conflict, preferring to emphasize how natural charisma can carry the individual through production into successful performance. Some testimonials from within the industry speak to a certain effect of estrangement, however. An example is provided in the 1979 report of Harald Tusberg, a veteran performer in Norwegian TV entertainment, who went to America and was quite literally trained to be authentic:

Tusberg's insightful testimony to the augmentation of individuality reminds us of just how strange and paradoxical the production of media performances is. That strangeness has to do with the need to carefully plan what we usually think of as unplanned. It certainly speaks of extensive changes that can be felt by the performer as affecting the sense of self, although in a somewhat unresolved way. The references to “learning to walk” and being “taught to ‘mean’” seems to speak of an experience whose realness is hard to gauge but that is still felt as being strongly affective. Finally, by focusing on the element of paradox and estrangement, the citation from Tusberg reminds us that the logic of training for making a performance seem real and natural is an organizational, not an individual one. A strong link exists between this pervasive and peculiar process of individual transformation, the affordances of media technologies, and the requirements of modern media organizations. That link lies at the heart of the study of how media performances are produced.

NOTES

1 Goffman's key text is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959. Around this time, related arguments about the foundational importance of performance were made in several academic fields. In rhetoric, Kenneth Burke (1969) developed the concept of “dramatism” as a strategic use of language in social circumstances. In 1955 J. L. Austin presented his theory of the “performative” aspect of language (Austin, 1975). His argument that language is not just a means of representation but also a mode of “doing” has been extended to a number of fields. The performative approach has powerfully informed feminist scholarship (see Butler, 1990) and is central to the cross-disciplinary field of performance studies (for an overview of these connections, see Carlson, 2004).

2 This tendency has been much commented on by media researchers, perhaps most famously in three dedicated issues of Journal of Communication (1983, 1993a, 1993b).

3 At roughly the same point in time, Scannell (1991, p. 11) argued that “all broadcast output is [. . .] a self-conscious, self-reflexive performance produced for audiences that are situated elsewhere.”

4 The following section builds on an interpretation of Goffman's work that has been presented by me in greater detail elsewhere (Ytreberg, 2002, 2010). On this interpretation, his late essay “Radio Talk” (Goffman, 1981b) is a key text in terms of contributing both to media studies and to media and communication theory.

5 See also Lundell (2009). A more restrictive use of the concept of scripting can be found in Paddy Scannell's (2003) historical analysis of the management of liveness in British radio. Here scripted talk is contrasted with talk that is live and unscripted.

6 Critical discussions of persona and authenticity can be found among others in Dyer (1987), Gledhill (1991), and Tolson (2001).

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FURTHER READING

Nylund, M. (2006). Control and collaboration: Interviewing and editing in television news production. In M. Ekström, Å. Kroon, & and M. Nylund (Eds.), News from the interview society (pp. 207–224). Gothenburg, Sweden: Nordicom.