Shaping post-welfarism : social class discourse in post-reality TV media

Abstract

This thesis explores how post-reality TV media discourse helps to shape post- welfarism as the natural, commonsensical way forward for society. Taking the steady growth of British anti-welfare attitudes as its starting point, and acknowledging that neoliberal hegemony has largely been achieved through language and discourse, the thesis employs insights from sociolinguistics and critical discourse studies to analyse three stages of a factual welfare television genre chain found on YouTube. The three data sets are: the most popular episode of Benefits Street—a British post-reality TV documentary about welfare; the comments attached; and a follow-up TV event which includes a welfare-themed, live studio debate.

Analysing a genre chain allows the thesis to examine how the different participants’ use of various communicative modes and affordances contribute to the shaping of common-sense post-welfare ideologies in distinct and mutually interacting ways. In the episode of Benefits Street, the twin structures of benefits and street are portrayed as forces which constrain and demotivate the local residents. Upwards wealth redistribution (i.e., cutting benefits) is implicitly but continually proposed as the main solution to these constraints, as it would free the street’s residents from the stultifying effects of welfare and motivate them to succeed. In the comments attached to the episode, YouTube users deploy social class emblems of taste, choice and voice. These emblems construct benefits recipients as not just wasting their ‘privileges’ and speaking poorly, but as being spoiled by those very privileges, while speaking theirpoverty into being. A focus on dispute and evaluation leads to the live debate becoming a spectacle of recognition. This positions welfare claimants as failures in a meritocratic society while offering discursive recognition as a remedy instead of economic redistribution. Collectively, the factual welfare television data sets promote post- welfare discourses of individual competition as motivating, and social structures as constraining. As factual welfare television is itself a symptom of a deregulated, highly competitive media industry ‘cut loose’ from the ‘burden’ of public funding, both the genre and the context from which it emerges are neoliberal and post-welfarist in orientation. Post-welfarism calls for a leaner state, which in turn suggests less public funding for the media, therefore, in this way, the neoliberalisation of society and the media dialectically reinforce one another.

The thesis makes several contributions to studies of media and welfare discourses. It carries out the first in-depth, critical and multimodal analysis of Benefits Street, which provides evidence for future researchers not only of one text’s ideological substance, but of how it continually shapes ideologies of post-welfarism as the commonsensical and compassionate way forward. The thesis also demonstrates the social-discursive work that internet commenters do to creatively recirculate and construct visible social class emblems which can be used to index less visible socioeconomic statuses. This provides readers with a repeatedly reinforced and growing pool of semiotic resources with which to identify an apparently ever- expanding welfare class. Finally, the thesis shows that the spectacle, evaluation and dispute which characterise post-reality TV media are both reflections and key drivers of post-welfare ideologies.