There’s not going to be a Big Brother 3 this year. As it turns out, the experience of interactive navel-gazing wasn’t so much fun the second time round. Viewership figures for BB2 proved something about people at dinner parties who pretended’ not to care about the self-gratification habits of bald hippies they really didn’t care. So instead of giving the kids of local subscribers yet another SMS-based national bulletin board, Multichoice is going after untainted subscribers up north. This year the rest of the continent will have a bunch of elite citizens sitting on couches watching a bunch of elite citizens sitting on couches.
Of course, none of this means we’re witnessing the floggings of a dead media horse. As Will Self, the novelist/journalist known as the Jack the Ripper of English prose’ observed back in 2000: We’ve entered a new era of virtuality, where the interpenetration of a plethora of communications media, from CCTV and mobile phones to webcams and cable channels, has created an environment in which never before have so many watched so many others, doing so very little.
Self had penned that comment in the context of the broader promise of convergence,’ and the question posed was whether it would truly lead to a golden age of participatory democracy. His answer? Why bother labouring to translate your being across space, time, gender, ethnicity or religion, when you can watch some bimbo exactly like the one next door plucking her bikini line on television?
In 2003 we can safely say that Self was on the button. While the media conglomerates may very well believe in the loftier purposes they’re espousing, market realities ensure they remain close to the ground. The anonymity principle inherent in the era of virtuality’ simply makes the seedier content more profitable, which means mainstream content like Big Brother either gets seedier or gets boring. It’s a phenomenon touched on in this month’s cover story by Donald Paul, and it’s linked to the cult of celebrity’ theme suggested by Graeme Addison in his superb feature on Afrikaans magazines, which in turn ties in with the question of editorial quality brought up by David Bullard in his Offline’ column. Other than that, the issue is pretty respectable.