What Orwell might have said about today’s Big Brothers
http://theconversation.com/what-orwell-might-have-said-about-todays-big-brothers-28462
Whos watching who?
What Orwell might have said about todays Big Brothers
25 June 2014, 11.57am BST
So its Day 21 in Channel 5s Big Brother household. It would also have been George Orwells 111th birthday. And this month marks 65 years since his landmark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published. With all that in mind, Im taking a moment to think about what Orwell means to us in 2014.
Big Brother is watching you wherever you are in Orwells dystopian world. The novels anti-hero, Winston Smith, has to huddle in the alcove of his living room to avoid the gaze of the telescreen which monitors him and every other citizen day and night. Constant surveillance is the cornerstone of Big Brothers power. Each resident lives like an inmate of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon, caught up, as Michel Foucault would say, in a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.
Since the Big Brother reality TV game show first took the Netherlands by storm in 1999, it seems weve become increasingly used to watching inmates ourselves. Back in 2000, when Big Brother first aired in the UK, it attracted some 10 million viewers. Research suggests that watching reality television fulfils some of our basic desires for vicarious experience and self-importance. It offers us a gratifying illusion one that Orwell would probably warn against buying into if his novels are anything to go by.
~snip~
Whether its capitalism, imperialism or totalitarianism, Orwells novels impress upon us that those who refuse to become slaves to the dominant ideology face alienation, defeat, incarceration, even destruction. John Flory of Orwells first novel, Burmese Days (1934), is a timber merchant in Burma sickened by imperial values. But his attempt to finally bring himself to stand up against his compatriots racism in support of his Indian friend only leads to his suicide.