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Lining up for Big Brother by Rick McKinney for Yack.com April 7, 2000
For those of us who long ago read George Orwell's "1984" and shivered a shiver of fear at the looming technological invasion of privacy, the present popularity of live web cams and reality TV is irony at its finest. MTV's "The Real World" was kindergarten. "The Truman Show": grade school. Introducing Big Brother, voyeur TV out of Holland. Sophistication level: junior high. Remember junior high? Remember how back then kids would do almost anything to fit in? Well, forget about back then and forget about the fear & loathing of losing your privacy to Big Brother. People long out of junior high, adults, are lining up by the thousands to sell their privacy for money and fame so that you don't have to! The latest web and TV snooping craze began last Fall in the Netherlands. A dozen people willingly went into lock-down together in an Amsterdam house under the constant surveillance of two dozen cameras, 59 microphones and, at the show's peak, fully one-third of the country's population. The dozen were chosen from over 3000 applicants. The daily doings of the cooped-up cast riveted Dutch viewers and sent producers from all over Europe and the U.S. stepping over each other to buy the rights. Here the junior high analogy goes one step further. Not only are the participants sealed off from the outside world both physically and intellectually (no TV, radio, phone, etc), they are in competition to be the sole survivor as the group votes out its members one by one. If you're in a hurry to play fly-on-the-wall with a dozen people trapped in a compound-like house and pitted against one another, http://Bigbrother-haus.de will tap you right into Germany's version of the show. There's no English translation on the site, so if you don't speak German it will seem even colder and spookier than it looks. The first message that greets visitors to the site reads, "Du bist nicht allein," or you are not alone. In February, CNN.com reported that CBS paid $20 million for the rights to a U.S. version of the show. Presently being taped on the tropical island of Palau Tiga, off Borneo in the South China Sea, "Survivor" blends the Big Brother theme with Gilligan's Island, pitting 16 vastly different American contestants against one another in a similar (yet snake-filled) surveillance environment. For a preview of that show, visit http://www.cbs.com/network/tvshows/mini/survivor/. It's unclear from the CBS site whether or not the show will be web cast, but the site itself is worth checking out with its audition videos and cast biographies. With a cast ranging from a female student in her early twenties to a 72-year-old retired Navy Seal, it's sure to be interesting. As with junior high school, the concept is not without its dark side, however. A Swedish predecessor of the Dutch show was tainted before it even aired when the first member to be ousted committed suicide. CNN.com quoted psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman as saying, "How - if they're going to be true to the concept -they are going to bring out these survival instincts and not have anyone get hurt, psychologically or physically, is a mystery to me."
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