Reality TV in Bulgaria: Social and Cultural Models and National Peculiarities

The changes in European media environment have been flowing in parallel directions in the last years. On one hand, the media fragmentarization increases in accordance with primarily declared and explored target media audience needs. As a result more media with different thematic have appeared, new media formats have been developed, media titles have been multiplied, media quality has been improved and the spectrum of media functions has been extended. This tendency may be actively observed in the last years, especially with the growing development and extending content of Internet. The appearance of quality media helps for social and ethnical groups’ interests to be correctly shown. But as to print media, it leads to decrease in circulation, to reductions in advertising revenues, to bankrupt threat and above all to thwarting the very existence of pluralistic journalism in the relevant national media system. On the other side, the second tendency is more widespread and, unfortunately, not very positively evaluated – from media researchers as much as from the media audience. It is related to the increasing commercialization of media content, as well as to the different media brands interlocking in some giant transnational media companies. Most of them offer identical as theme, narrative and messages media content for various media audience – regardless the different media forms (press, radio, television, Internet) or different national audience. This is made to the aim of reaching greater audience, and also putting down production costs, and putting up their ads profits. A similar position belongs to the British media theoretician Kevin Williams: “Commercialization is also seen as responsible for the “dumbing down’, “tabloidization’ or “boulevardisierung’ of European television and media in general… Serious content, including politics, news and current affairs, is being either cut back or diluted to reflect the market demand for more entertainment. Specifically it means more human stories, less political coverage, fewer international and more local stories, hard news being replaced by sex, scandal and celebrities.’ Another British researcher shares the same worries. The mass communication theoretician Denis McQuail, wrote in a report in 1998: “The TV program itself has become more sensational, more negative, focusing more on scandals and rituals in politics. Entertainment has increasingly focused on sex and violence, on simplistic stereotypes, more rapid editing as part of a slowly developing “video-clip aesthetic’, a new confusion of realities and television realities.’ Certainly, this is a leading tendency in the last years. Infotainment is imposed on the media space – a mix between information and entertainment, as a result, the hard news almost disappeared, but soft news, mass culture, lifestyle, video democracy etc. are popularized. The question we have to ask for is whether social stability and social development are dismissed. And also if it is a one-way direction or the process are convertible and the present domination results from the contemporary social and historical conditions. Different researchers analyze media capacity to transform cultural conceptions and to form nationally differentiated cultural community. French scholars Olivier Mongin, Marc-Olivier Padis, Jean-Francois Barbier-Bouvet and Richard Robert divided the contemporary culture based on media interaction to two large areas – storage culture and culture de flux. The first model belongs to the traditional art forms, which are publicly presented in their authentic type and they could not be creatively rewritten. The second model characterizes the traditional media (press, radio, television), which offer the completed artifacts and cultural models, and represented their cultural code to the media audience. The new media (Internet, social networks, online journalism) are a combination between these two areas. They show the idea of culture as software, explicated by the German sociologist Ulrich …