Research
Authors
In 2016, the reality television program, The Real Housewives of Orange County, aired an episode featuring a cast visit to an Irish dairy farm. While the cast members struggled to acclimate to milking cows, audience members were actively tweeting their thoughts and feelings about the episode. The phenomenon of discussing television online while actively viewing a program is known as "social television" and has major implications for audience engagement, retention, and enjoyment. To fully explore the audience's response to this depiction of dairy farming, we conducted a social semiotic analysis of the episode's agricultural content alongside a thematic analysis of the resulting Twitter/X conversation. We found that the farm segments focused on the inherent humor in affluent American women taking part in farm labor, with emphasis on their distaste for getting dirty. The farm itself was presented as bucolic, and the individuals working on the farm largely avoided traditional media stereotypes of farmers. The resulting Twitter/X conversation closely echoed the show's depiction, with many viewers poking fun of the women's behavior and statements while also bemoaning the farm setting as unglamorous. Some viewers agreed with cast member comments about avoiding animal products due to either emotional connections to the livestock or concerns about the cleanliness of the farm, but little focus was placed on the ethics of dairying or animal welfare concerns.
Keywords: Reality television, social semiotics, social media, social television
How to Cite: Specht, A. R. & Gold, M. (2026) “They're Not in Orange County Anymore: The Convergence of Social Semiotics and Social Television in Audience Responses to Reality Television Depictions of Dairy Farming”, Journal of Applied Communications. 110(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.4148/jac.20851
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