[Marxism] Welcome Big Brother!

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

     Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms

     To a post-cold-war generation of Americans,
     the prospect of living under surveillance
     is no longer scary but cool.

 By EMILY EAKIN, THINK TANK, New York Times, January 17, 2004


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. Today,
more than twice as many young people apply to MTV?s ?Real World? show
than to Harvard, he says.
[clip]
the reality genre appears to fulfill the democratic promise of the
emerging interactive economy, turning passive cultural consumers into
active ones who can star on shows or vote on their outcomes.
[clip]
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.
[clip]
Full:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/17/arts/17REAL.html?th


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