Do You Really Know Me?

I don’t know how many people have seen the MTV TV show that began airing earlier this year called “If You Really Knew Me”, but it is a quite an interesting premise for a reality show.

The show follows a group which goes around to high schools in the United States of America where there have been long-standing problems of social group division, bullying, prejudice or racism. Two speakers are sent to the school to host a day of events with the intention of breaking down the judgement and division between the different students, called a Challenge Day. Some of the activities include identifying the societal expectations forced on both genders, having people break into groups to share a secret with about seven or eight other students in their grade and also having students publicly apologize to other students who they might have hurt through bullying or their prejudice.

While the intentions of the group are right; they want to lower the levels of prejudice and judgement in the high schools that they visit, it is interesting that the way that MTV seems to format the show only directs the audience’s attention to the divides within each school.

The show’s format specifically follows about five or six students who will be participating in the Challenge Day, and the show labels these individuals as clearly belonging to different social groups, such as ‘Jocks, ‘Popular’, ‘Loners’, ‘Nerds’, ‘Band Geeks’ et cetera. These stereotypical high school cliques that have been repeated over and over again in teen movies are being associated with the students highlighted in this show. Sometimes when the students are doing their own introductory videos, they even identify themselves with one of these titles.

Why, in a show that is trying to erase these social cliques and their boundaries, do they immediately identify the students they have chosen to highlight with these terms? I believe it points to the idea that the audience watching this show wouldn’t be able to completely process the events occurring if they did not have a base set of assumptions that they could associate to each of the students introduced. It is almost as if the students in the show have to be in some way turned into characters in order for the audience to properly identify with them.

In other reality TV shows, such as Jersey Shore which we have discussed often in class, the shows are much more direct in the way that they either chose people for the show that are like characters from scripted TV shows, or they portray them in very stereotypical ways. Yet whether it is done directly or more subversively, it seems to be a trend among reality TV shows to create caricatures of these real people. I think this is reflective of the inherent need for our society to have some set list of attributes from which we can form judgements. In order for our society to properly comprehend or empathize with another, a certain precedence of that person’s personality must be formed, even if it is based off of judgements and stereotypes.