Face Down: Analysis of the Reception of the Tv Series "Normal People" Among Millennials in Serbia and Conceptualization of the Sudden Error in Research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v17i2.3Keywords:
TV series, Normal people, millennials, viewer enjoyment, research errorAbstract
The TV series Normal People (2020) is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by the young Irish writer Sally Rooney. The book achieved tremendous popularity, particularly among younger audiences – so-called millennials – and the TV series only added new layers of popularity and identification. The success of both of these works can be explained by the skillful way in which Rooney has managed to link and intertwine the romance between the protagonists with the social context in which it is set, thus depicting the generational experience of growing up with the consequences of ay social and economic crisis. This is something that young people could identify with, not only in Ireland but also in other societies affected by the economic crisis which began in 2008, and to which many new crises have since been added (the latest one being the health crisis due to the pandemic), while many earlier ones still reverberate in people’s experiences. Seeking to examine how the globally broadcast TV series Normal People has resonated with the local reception context and viewers’ experiences, in this paper I focus on the aspect of reception of this series by its audience in Serbia, aiming to shed light on the dimension of "viewer enjoyment" in viewing practice and to address the question of the importance of this aspect of "watching TV" for the understanding of the meaning and social impact of television texts. It turned out that the initial idea of collecting material for analysis through an open invitation to participate in online research, with an essay response to the question about the reasons why they enjoyed watching the show (or not), was flawed, as the response rate was lower than expected, which resulted in the empirical "thinning" of the research, but also provided an opportunity to consider some of the problems in qualitative (online) research on contemporary issues and media texts. Exploring these methodological and epistemological problems unexpectedly became an important part of the paper, alongside the research results. The research itself pointed to a new type of viewer, namely, expert viewers, who have become experts through being active in complex technological environments in which they watch TV content, and which they use to inform themselves about it. In addition, the results indicate that the practice of bingeing, linked to the intensification of enjoyment and identification of female viewers, is very widespread. Finally, the most important themes mentioned in their comments were the themes of gender relations/sexuality and the questions of class and social inequality, along with mental health. A "symptomatic reading" of the comments of Normal People’s female viewers in Serbia reveals shared concerns and anxieties in dealing with a rapidly changing world, which is constantly being faced with crises – past ones, current ones, those that have just subsided or those that are yet to come, creating a new sense of "collective fragility", individual, economic or political.
Downloads
References
Abu Lughod, Lila. 1993. „Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest“. Public Culture 5: 493-513. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-5-3-493
Abu Lughod, Lila. 1995. „The Object of Soap Opera: Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics of Modernity“. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local, edited by Daniel Miller, 190-210. London and New York: Routledge.
Abu Lughod, Lila. 1997. “The Interpretation of Culture(s) after Television”. Representations 59: 109-134. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928817
Abu Lughod, Lila. 2004. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. The University of Chicago Press. Kindle.
Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Routledge.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.
Banić Grubišić, Ana. 2013. „Antropološki pristup medijima – kratak pregled (sa posebnim osvrtom na igrani film)“. Antropologija 13 (2): 135-155.
Barnard, Ian. 2006. “The Language of Multiculturalism in South African Soaps and Sitcoms”. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 1 (1): 39-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/10382040608668531.
Bauman, Zigmunt. 2009. Fluidna ljubav: O krhkosti ljudskih veza. Novi Sad: Mediterran Publishing.
Bren, Paulina. 2011. The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Cornell University Press. Kindle.
Brković, Čarna. 2022. “’Thinking With’ When Peer Reviewing”. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. June 13. https://polarjournal.org/2022/06/13/introduction-thinking-with-when-peer-reviewing/.
Cain, Sian. 2019. „Normal People: how Sally Rooney’s novel became the literary phenomenon of the decade”. Gardian 8. januar 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/08/normal-people-sally-rooney-novel-literary-phenomenon-of-decade.
Cvjetićanin, Tijana. 2010. „Čiji 'Rođak sa sela'? Ideološko čitanje jednog medijskog teksta“. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU LVIII (1): 57-68. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI1001057C.
Das, Veena. 1995. „On soap opera: what kind of anthropological object is it?“. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local, edited by Daniel Miller, 169-189. London and New York: Routledge.
Donohue, Cecilia. “’Normal People Indeed!’: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk”. Irish Journal of American Studies. http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-10-cecilia-donohue/.
Erdei, Ildiko. 2017. „Fragmenti jugoslovenske socijalističke modernosti 1970-ih u TV seriji Pozorište u kući“. Etnoantropološki problemi 12 (2): 537-563. DOI: 10.21301/eap.v12i2.9.
Erdei, Ildiko. 2018. Čekajući Ikeu: od tačkica do ikeizacije. Beograd: Evoluta.
Erdei, Idiko. 2020. Moderni život u udarnom terminu: televizija, humor i politika u jugoslovenskom socijalizmu. Beograd: Evoluta.
Erdei, Ildiko. 2020a. „Public Virtues and Private Pleasures: How TV culture emerged in Socialist Yugoslavia”. Acta Universitates: 93-108. https://doi.org/10.22190/FUPSPH2002093E.
Erdei, Ildiko. 2021. “Elastičnost i otpor – svakodnevne prakse u tranziciji ka post-kovid realnosti”. U Svakodnevica i društveni odgovori na epidemijske krize 1914-2020, uredio Milan Ristović, 123-135. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Fisher, Eran and Yoav Mehozay. 2019. „How algorithms see their audience: media epistemes and the changing conception of the individual”. Media, Culture and Society 41(8): 1176-1191. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0163443719831598.
Fisk, Gloria. 2020. „What Are Feelings For? From Reading Sally Rooney“. Post45. https://post45.org/2020/06/what-are-feelings-for/.
Friedman, Jonathan. 2004. Consumption and Identity. London: Routledge.
Gavrilović, Ljiljana. 2011. „Bafi ubica vampira: superheroina ali ne u Srbiji“. Etnoantropološki problemi 6 (2): 413-428. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v6i2.7.
Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. „Culture/Media: a Mild Polemic“. Anthropology Today 10 (2): 5-15. https://doi.org/10.2307/2783305
Ginsburg, D. Faye, Lila Abu Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds). 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology of New Terrain. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Goddemaer, Jente. 2020. Equal Affection Cannot Be: Imagining Happiness Through Affect in Sally Rooney's Normal People and Conversations with Friends (dissertation, Ghent University). https://libstore.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/862/764/RUG01-002862764_2020_0001_AC.pdf.
Grady, Constance. 2019. „The Cult of Sally Rooney“. Vox. 3.9. 2019.
Hermes, J. 2010. The ‘ethnographic turn’: The histories and politics of the new audience research. Leicester: Department of Media & Communication, University of Leicester.
Horeck, Tanya. 2021. “’Netflix and Heal’: The Shifting Meanings of Binge-Watching during the Covid-19 Crisis”. Film Quarterly 75 (1): 35–40. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2021.75.1.35.
Howe, Neil and William Strauss. 2000. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books.
Hughes, Jason, Anna Tarrant, Kahryn Hughes and Grace Sykes. 2021. F**k Ups in Social Research: Learning From What Goes Wrong. Postavljen 2.8.2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/08/02/fk-ups-in-social-research-learning-from-what-goes-wrong/.
Ilić, Vladimira. 2021. „Strah u doba korone“. U Žikić, Bojan (uredio). Kovid-19 u Srbiji '20., uredio Bojan Žikić, 157-172. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Jarić, Isidora. 2008. “Generation W: From the Young People’s Perspective”. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology n. s. 3 (3): 203-221. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v3i3.11
Johnson, Catherine, Lauren Dempsey. 2020. “How coronavirus might have changed TV viewing habits for good – new research”. The Conversation 11.11.2020. https://theconversation.com/how-coronavirus-might-have-changed-tv-viewing-habits-for-good-new-research-146040.
Kanter, Jake. 2020. „Normal People Becomes BBC’s Most-Streamed Series In Record-Breaking Year For iPlayer”. Deadline 7.12.2020. https://deadline.com/2020/12/normal-people-62m-views-record-bbc-iplayer-1234651479/.
Katz, Stephen. 2008. „Generation X: A Critical Sociological Perspective”. Generations. Journal of the American Society on Aging 41 (3): 12-19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26556295.
Kovačević, Ivan, Marija Brujić. 2014. “’Ljubav na prvi pogled’: TV serije. Uvod u antropološku analizu”. Etnoantropološki problemi n.s. 9 (2): 395-415. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v9i2.7.
Kovačević, Ivan. 2018. „O antropologiji TV serija“. Zbornik radova Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti 33: 97-112.
Krek, Maja. 2018. „Šta znači prosečna zarada ako je većina nema“. Peščanik, 4.1.2018. https://pescanik.net/sta-znaci-prosecna-zarada-ako-je-vecina-nema/.
Krstić, Marija. 2009. „Srbi, narod najluđi – humoristička serija Kursadžije Grand produkcije“. Etnoantropološki problemi 4 (1): 87-105. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v4i1.4.
Krstić, Marija. 2009a. „Kursadžije – terapeutska uspavanka? Analiza popularne domaće humorističke serije“. Antropologija 7: 137-152.
Kuljić, Todor. 2009. Sociologija generacije. Beograd: Čigoja štampa.
Livingstone, Sonia. 2019. „Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research”. Television and New Media 20 (2): 170-183. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1527476418811118.
Luders, Marika. 2021. „Self-determined or controlled, seeking pleasure, or meaning? Identifying what makes viewers enjoy watching television on streaming services”. Poetics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101639.
Matović, Marijana. 2021. „Medijske generacije u Srbiji“. Etnoantropološki problemi n.s. 16 (2): 459-490. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v16i2.6.
Milanović, Nevena. 2021. „Imperativ 'brige o sebi' tokom pandemije kovida-19: prakse postizanja emotivnog i fizičkog blagostanja“. U Kovid-19 u Srbiji '20, uredio Bojan Žikić, 127-140. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Miller, Daniel. 1993. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.
Mil¬ler, Dan¬iel, ed. 1995. Worlds Apar¬t¬ – M¬odernit¬y Throu¬gh the Prism ¬of t¬he Local. Lo¬nd¬on¬ and New¬ York: ¬Ro-utledge.
Mil¬le¬r, Dani¬el, ed. 1996. Acknow¬l¬edgi¬ng Cons¬umption¬: A Review of¬ New¬ Studies¬. ¬London and New Y¬or¬k: Routledge.
Miller, Daniel¬. 1997. Mode¬rn¬ity – A¬n Ethnographic Approach¬: Du¬alism and¬ Mass C¬onsumption in Trinidad. Oxf-ord¬, New Yor¬k: Berg Publishers.
Milosavljević, Ljubica. 2021. „Biti star u epidemiji kovida-19: antropološka analiza kvaliteta života“. U Kovid-19 u Srbiji '20., uredio Bojan Žikić, 89-108. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Milosavljević, Ljubica, ur. 2022. „Antropologija TV serija“ (temat). Etnoantropološki problemi 17 (1).
Mitrović, M. Katarina. 2021. Fenomen “produžene mladosti” u Beogradu: etnološko-antropološka analiza (doktorska disertacija). Beograd: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu.
Mitrović, Katarina. 2021a. „Rad od kuće: novi pristupi životnim prostorima tokom kovid-19 pandemije“. U Kovid-19 u Srbiji '20., uredio Bojan Žikić, 189-202. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Nielsen. 2020. COVID-19: Tracking the Impact on Media Consumption (16.6.2020.). https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/covid-19-tracking-the-impact-on-media-consumption/.
O'Connor, Barbara and Elizabeth Klaus. 2000. „Pleasure and meaningful discourse: An overview of research issues”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (3): 369-387. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F136787790000300304.
Oliver, Mary Beth and Arthur A. Raneu. 2011. „Entertainment as Pleasurable and Meaningful: Identifying Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Entertainment Consumption”. Journal of Communication 61: 984-1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01585.x.
Pakdaman, Fatemeh Sara. 2020. „Normal People: Kudos to Vulnerability, A Tribute to Friendship”. Review of European Studies 12 (4): 49-58. DOI: 10.5539/res.v12n4p49.
Radivojević, Sonja. 2016. Mobilni telefon kao kulturni objekat: upotreba i značenja mobilnog telefona u kulturi mladih (diplomski rad). Beograd: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu.
Radulović, Lidija. 2021. „'Fizička distanca' vice versa 'socijalna distanca' u vreme pandemije – antropološki ogledi o društvenim i kulturnim praksama“. U Svakodnevica i društveni odgovori na epidemijske krize, uredio Milan Ristović, 109-122. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
RedBee 2020. Audiences in Lockdown – How Covid-19 Has Supercharged the Power of TV. https://www.redbeecreative.com/insights/blog/audiences-in-lockdown-how-covid19-has-supercharged-the-power-of-tv (20.5.2020).
Runi, Sali. 2020. Normalni ljudi. Beograd: Geopoetika.
Sarikaya-Sen, Merve. 2021. „A Relentless Quest for a Paradoxical Normality: Sally Rooney's Normal People“. CUJHHS. June, 15/1: 79-90. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1849906.
Simons, Nele. 2015. “TV drama as a social experience: An empirical investigation of the social dimensions of watching TV drama in the age of non-linear television”. Communications 40 (2): 219–236. DOI: 10.1515/commun-2015-0005.
Snow Molloy, Deborah. 2020. „Home/Sickness and Normal People“. Literary Geographies 6 (2): 230-234. https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/297.
Stanford, Eleanor. 2020. „Normal People Takes Sex Seriously”. New York Times 17.4.2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/arts/television/normal-people-hulu.html.
Stein, Louisa Ellen. 2015. Millenial Fandom. Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Terkl, Šeri. 2011. Sami zajedno. Beograd: Clio.
Tomanović, Smiljka, Dragan Stanojević, Isidora Jarić, Dušan Mojić, Slađana Dragišić Labaš, Milana Ljubičić i Ivana Živadinović. 2012. Mladi – naša sadašnjost: Istraživanje socijalnih biografija mladih u Srbiji. Beograd: Čigoja štampa i Institut za sociološka istraživanja Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu.
Trifunović, Vesna. 2009. „Konceptualizacija gubitnika i dobitnika tranzicije u popularnoj kulturi“. Etnoantropološki problemi 4 (1): 107-121. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v4i1.5.
Trifunović, Vesna. 2009a. „Tipizacija privatnika u periodu prve tranzicije: primer domaćih serija“. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 57 (1): 135-146. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI0901135T.
Trifunović, Vesna, Jovana Diković. 2014. „Mile versus Transition: Social changes and clashes of values through the prism of a television show“. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 62 (2): 141-153. DOI: 10.2298/GEI1402141T.
Walton, Julia. 2021. „'Does it have to be complicated?' Technologically Mediated Romance and Identity in Sally Roney's Conversation with Friends and Normal People“. Evidence. https://tortoise.princeton.edu/2021/05/02/does-it-have-to-be-complicated-technologically-mediated-romance-and-identity-in-sally-rooneys-conversations-with-friends-and-normal-people/.
Zlatović, Anja. 2021. „Smrt u doba korone. Analiza virtuelnih rituala smrti i žaljenja za vreme karantina i pandemije virusa kovid-19“. U Kovid-19 u Srbiji '20., uredio Bojan Žikić, 203-218. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filozofski fakultet.
Žikić, Bojan, Mladen Stajić, Marko Pišev. 2020. „The New Normal and Covid-19 in Serbia from February to May 2020”. Etnoantropološki problemi 15 (4): 949-978. https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v15i4.1.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.