Less than a week after the show began about 100000 people had already registered on the website
David Shapshak
Big Brother may not dominate many South African’s lives but it has certainly taken over the country’s Internet.
In an unprecedented move, M-Web the country’s largest Internet service provider (ISP) and sister company to M-Net, which is producing the show sent an e-mail to its 270000 dial-up subscribers last Friday blaming the reality TV show for e-mail and Internet congestion.
The website for the popular show, which started nearly two weeks ago, has swallowed up bandwidth to such an extent that e-mail and Web surfing have become a problem. The traffic, said M-Web, was much more than they had anticipated.
Many large companies, including Dimension Data, have blocked access to the Big Brother website (www. bigbrothersa.com) after their corporate networks ground to a halt. Bored executives and secretaries have used their dedicated digital lines to watch the daily banalities of the 12 housemates, who at times seem as bored.
The IT manager of one large Internet company said he was forced to block access because users were struggling to access his site due to the bandwidth demands of the staff. In what is sure to become an urban legend, he related how someone had been docked two days’ pay for wasting their working time watching Big Brother. It was a friend of a colleague, of course.
The Internet statistics involved are huge and are quite unprecedented in the country’s history, albeit not out of synch with the inexplicable fascination derived from watching 12 strangers feed chickens and sit in a jacuzzi for longer than our mothers told us was healthy.
By Friday last week, when M-Web was prompted to defend itself, about 100000 people had registered, while the site had dealt with 3,5-million page impressions and 550000 multimedia streams were requested according to Oracle Online Sales, who is selling the site’s advertising and sponsorship. But by Wednesday morning these figures increased exponentially. There were 155000 registered users (a 50% increase), page impressions shot up to 7,5-million (114%) and video stream requests leapt to one million (82%).
The Mail & Guardian’s online sister publication, the Daily Mail & Guardian, at one time was the most visited news site in the country with about two million page impressions. This figure is still considered significant for South African sites, as the Audit Bureau of Internet Standards’s (ABIS) latest report on traffic demonstrates.
And, according to the latest survey from Nielsen NetRatings, the Internet audience measurement service, there are just more than 2,5-million people with Internet access.
Are all of these people watching, or just a segment of dedicated followers? What is certain is that the range of viewers, both on the Net and via the dedicated 24-hour DStv channel, are as diverse a slice of South Africans as all the fans of the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
A manager on a leading consulting firm said his normally sombre office is transformed for at least 30 minutes each morning for a conversation “about who did what to whom and whether they enjoyed it”.
The Big Brother phenomenon has already been dubbed the biggest Internet event in the country, while there appears to be no end in sight to the site’s popularity.
“The website has taken our breath away with original estimates of individuals who would use the website already surpassed by a factor of four.
“Noother Web event has ever achieved the overnight success that Big Brother currently enjoys and we have still, after 10 days, not seen a slowdown inthe numbers,” says Richard Fyffe, general manager of Oracle Online Sales.
Considering that more people voted for the final winner in the United Kingdom than in the country’s government elections, we might be on the way towards the same stupefying statistics that prove people are more interested in the mundane, the trivial and the utterly boring than, well, politics itself a prime example of the mundane, the trivial and the utterly boring.
All of these congestion problems have highlighted one significant South African, if not human, trait. When something goes wrong, blame someone else.
No sooner had the country’s bandwidth stuttered to a crawl, when the accusations began flying between ISPs about whose fault the slow service was.
The great irony of it, as George Orwell might be the first to point out, is that Big Brother may be watching the contestants, but we’re watching Big Brother. It was an irony seemingly lost on the house’s inhabitants, who were unaware of the Big Brother concept, until, I’m told, Irvan informed them.
Orwell probably never foresaw how much the technology would make it possible to observe the ordinary lives of ordinary people, albeit in such an unordinary situation.