Forgive me Father for I have Thinned: surveilling the bio-citizen through Twitter

Abstract

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality weight-loss television show that aims to address the notion of an ‘obesity epidemic’ by instructing viewers about how to be responsible for their own health. The popular American show, produced by the National Broadcasting Company, has become a televised confessional for contestants, whereby participants are asked to reflect on their health struggles and express general disgust, disappointment and/or hope about their changing physical state. This study observes that many viewers take their cue from the contestants and use social media to confess their own health sins and ask for redemption. The goal of this study was to provide insight into how viewers of TBL make sense of and interact with the information (re)produced by the television show by analysing viewer engagement through Twitter. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the authors argue that Twitter facilitates the ability to create a public record of personal transgressions, obedience and transformation, which are necessary confessional processes for the production of ‘good’ bio-citizens. Viewers of TBL were observed to facilitate their own captivity and regulation in the Obesity Clinic, an invisible structure that invites individuals to adhere to normative concepts of behaviour. This analysis concludes by arguing for the cancellation of TBL due to the dangerous precedent it creates for both its contestants and viewers.

Keywords:

• Twitter
• Biggest Loser
• obesity
• confession
• surveillance

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Dr Fiona Moola, Vincci Li and Mark Norman for their insightful feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Some scholars contest the ‘obesity epidemic’ because the research used to support the idea of an epidemic may be considered flawed or exaggerated (Campos 2004, Gard and Wright 2005) and few certainties can be found (Rich and Evans 2005). In addition, obesity is not a communicable or infectious disease which would be required for a medical definition of an epidemic (Murray 2008). Therefore, the authors acknowledge the counter research and the problematic nature of the term ‘epidemic’ as it pertains to obesity. Furthermore, authors use quotation marks around terms such as obesity, obese and fat to indicate the social construction of these terms to contrast scientific authority.

2. Obesity Clinic is capitalised to delineate it as a biopolitical project and a clinic without borders (Rail 2012).

3. Those with protected tweets are only visible to their followers.

4. GetGlue (now known as tvtag) is a social media site for television fans that allows people to ‘check-in’ to the show they are watching, receive recommendations for other shows and earn discounts for entertainment companies (Dubois 2010).

5. Foucault (1993) explains technologies of the self as ‘techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies … to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power and so on’ (p. 203).