Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).\u00a0The public responded negatively.\u00a0 Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page:<\/p>\n
The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.\u00a0 In a related story, civilization is down 500 points.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The trouble, it seems, comes from the weirdness of bringing together trivial-and-fake-“reality”-stars with the very-important-and-really-real-U.S.-financial-market.<\/p>\n
Economic sociologist Brooke Harrington<\/a>, however, thinks the two are less incongruent than they seem.\u00a0 She writes:<\/p>\n
I\u2019d like to suggest that what seems so wrong with that picture of Snooki and company ringing the opening bell actually makes a lot of sense sociologically. If this meeting of worlds\u2014entertainment and the stock market\u2014seems strange, it may be because we\u2019re so used to regarding the markets as \u201creal,\u201d rather than as a performance (or even as entertainment in their own right).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Markets, she explains, aren’t “more ‘real’ than ‘reality TV.'”\u00a0 Instead, both the characters on Jersey Shore<\/em> and markets are playing themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 The reality show stars respond to expectations of “Guido” and “Guidette” personalities.\u00a0 Likewise, the market responds to\u00a0 economists whose predictions often create the very reality that they anticipate.<\/p>\n
Harrington brings in a fancy concept:<\/p>\n
Both are engaged in producing what French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard<\/a> calls \u201cthe simulacrum:\u201d a copy without an original, a pretense that replaces and ultimately negates \u201creality\u201d so successfully that we no longer care about what is real.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She finishes:<\/p>\n
Theorized through this lens, the image of the Jersey Shore cast ringing the opening bell at the NYSE persists in memory not because it is represents a collision of worlds, but because it brings together two genres of performance whose entertainment value depends on their purported \u201creality.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).\u00a0The public responded negatively.\u00a0 Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page: The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.\u00a0 In a related story, civilization is down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,2104,343,285,1757,293],"class_list":["post-26779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-knowledgeintelligence","tag-tvmovies","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26779"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71314,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26779\/revisions\/71314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}