What is Interaction Order

This chapter studies the notion of technoself in a contemporary media phenomenon, reality television. How can we explain the attraction of the globalized formats of a genre without plot, actors, or director? Our most private human territory, the self, becomes a spectacle through the technological enhancement of its minute bodily expressions. The approach combines Peirce’s semiotic theory of meaning as the upshot of the interplay of different kinds of signs with Goffman’s order of interaction, the micro-social realm of face-to-face encounters. A vast audience is lured into observing the constant production of nonverbal language, which exposes the self through its visible manifestation in concrete, shifting identities. The true protagonists of the genre are the signs closest to the body: indexical signs create an almost tangible lure, the index appeal of reality television. They furnish access to what used to be the most private human realm, which has now become the technoself.