Exam question - How do young people form their collective identity through reality T.V?

Q: How do young people form their collective identity through reality T.V?

A:
Reality T.V tries to represent the real world by documenting real life events for the viewers entertainment. Over the years these have become increasingly popular within the lives of young people and as such they start to relate to the shows.
Some of the most popular reality T.V of today would be big brother and its style of seeing how ordinary people confined within a large house will act over continuous time spent together, this popular show is one of the best examples of how young people relate with reality t.v in order to form their collective identity.
this is u sally done though personality and how the members of the show are portrayed in order to let the viewers relate to them, for example people who are loud would relate more to the loud and active members of the show, while the viewers who consider themselves to be more quiet and observant might relate themselves to another member of the show.
Due to these shows becoming more and more popular among young people it is usually a topic of discussion and it is here that most youths begin to form a collective identity by relating each other to the members of the house and thus acting like them in order t form one collective identity of all the people of a specific type e.g. the loud ones.

Apart from peoples personality on reality shows people form collective identities with people due to there gender, age class and sexuality, another example of young people forming an identity around a reality t.v show would be with made in Chelsea and how the show portrays the life of looked after upper class young adults living in Chelsea. this show helps youths to construct collective identity due to the class they are placed in and how the audience will then have a certain opinion of that class based on the actions of the actors and the viewers will then in turn decide weather they belong within that class system or not depending on their personality and comparing it to that of the actors in the show.

Within t.v reality t.v shows, youths also seem to form collective identities within the shows, for example in the case of misfits they all group together due to their similarity of having ASBOs and being on the wrong side of the law, however at the same time forming there own unique identities within that group at the same time, for example Kurtis and Simon relating due to them not actually being seen as the bad people in life and Nathan and Kelly grouping together due to how there personalities are similar.

Another way in which youths form collective identity is through there "style" and how they act around other people, this can be seen within made in Chelsea and how they all form a collective identity together due to there upbringing and thus personality and view of things, this is shown with how the characters talk and what they wear compared to the normal clothing of everyone else around them in order to make them selves stand out and appear more "elegant" then others.

Collective identity can also be formed with how peoples opinion of others is similar to there own personality, such as within geordie shore and how all the characters seem to give off this portrayal of loud crude and obnoxious people and yet at the same time they all seem to have goes at one another for acting this way, thus it shows how they tend to form a social group of people who have similar personalities in order to be able to relate to them easier thus forming one collective identity.

In conclusion it seems that within reality t.v young people tend to form collective identity through similarity's between each other, weather it be due to there dress sense, the way they behave around others or just there general opinion of others. It seems that people within t.v and outside it form collective identity through some common cause of similarity between them which in turn allows them to start to relate to each other thus growing stronger bonds.