Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms: For 50 years, Big Brother was an unambiguous symbol of malignant state power, totalitarianism's all-seeing eye. Then Big Brother became a hip reality television show, in which 10 cohabiting strangers submitted to round-the-clock camera monitoring in return for the chance to compete for $500,000.
That transformation is telling, says Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. [...]
Reality shows glamorize surveillance, he writes, presenting it "as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world," "an entree into the world of wealth and celebrity" and even a moral good. [...]
As seductive as this sounds, in Mr. Andrejevic's view reality television is essentially a scam: propaganda for a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control while in fact subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and manipulation. [...]
In short, Mr. Andrejevic said, reality television's true beneficiaries are not the shows' cast members (who can wind up making little more than minimum wage for the hours — or months — they spend before the camera) or ordinary viewers (who don't really choose what happens on their television screens) but the marketers, advertisers and corporate executives who have a large stake in seeing surveillance portrayed as benign.
Of course, he conceded, his students don't necessarily see it this way. Raised on Web logs, Google, cellphones and instant messaging, they "divulge much more information about themselves on a daily basis than previous generations," he said, and they don't associate the idea of surveillance with a totalitarian Big Brother.
