Volume 5, No. 2, Art. 12 – May 2004

"Guess What?": On Hidden-Camera Pranks' Revelation Sequences

A. Javier Izquierdo-Martín (Spain)

Abstract: Conceived as public communication objects, hidden-camera pranks (HCPs) are a type of documentary on ordinary pranks. Defined versus classical Garfinkelian breaching experiments, HCPs also offer a natural form of ethnomethodological experimentation. Here I present some results of an analysis of a sample of forty-nine HCPs' revelation sequences (RSs). These little clips of five to fifty seconds long allow for the description of audio-visual details of the interactional work that actors, accomplices and victims of a HCP have to perform, in a finely coordinated manner in order "to put an end" to an artificially constructed social situation. My study focuses on a set of practical relevances of the work of revelation (offering) and awakening (acceptation/rejection) endogenously pointed at and topicalized by the agents enmeshed in the HCP situation.

Some of the phenomena discussed include: (a) mundane talk about audio-visual recording and broadcasting machinery substitute for scholarly justifications; (b) the dramaturgic and psychotherapeutic potential of humorous confusions and awakenings; and, finally, (c) the latter being natural discovering and accounting procedures of the engineering details of standard formats of digital audio and video.

Key words: hidden-camera pranks, ethnomethodological breaching experiments, naturally organized ordinary activities, in vivo dramatic art, vulgar psychotherapy, audio-videographic digital documents

This contribution is only available as a full text in the Spanish language. Spanish text

Last update: 05/10/2004

Volume 5, No. 2 Table of Contents

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