“Do You Understand What You're Accusing Me of?”: Confrontational Conversation in MTV's The Hills as a Means of Identity Construction and Social Positioning in Young Female Adults

Abstract

MTV's The Hills is a “reality” television program that follows the lives of four young female protagonists as they deal with concerns around work, friends, and relationships. The Hills presents a world of female friendships which is potentially continuous with the peer socialization of teen viewers and, as such, I argue offers a template to examine the importance of peer conversations in the construction of young female identities. In this article I draw on Harré's (1995) theory of social positioning to examine conversations around a particular confrontational incident in The Hills. Analysis of these interactions helps to make visible the roles of different types of conversation and interlocutors in the shaping of identity. I conclude that the ways in which this television program imparts modes of communication to young viewers reveals much about the importance of confrontation in conversational exchanges during the formative years.

Notes

¹Similar propositions might be made for groups of male friends, school friends, or work colleagues and represented on TV in programs such as Friends, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, and The IT Crowd.