Family Portrait

As the subject of An American Family, one of television’s first reality shows, the Loud family exemplified the "Margaret Mead effect" of the mediation of experience, where representation begins to influence behavior. Followed everywhere by cameras for seven months, emotional cracks and fissures developed from the constant surveillance, which peaked when Pat Loud asked her husband for a divorce on TV. Serving as a vehicle to represent and reproduce the values of society, the family is central to its psyche. Through television shows and advertisements, popular culture has combined to represent the family as central to "belonging," a unique group at the core of social obligation and order.