Angry Robot

Entertainment Surveillance

Big Brother is the greatest show on earth, “the programme that saw TV find its own voice as a medium,” “where the entire realist movement in twentieth-century art was leading.” High praise indeed. What’s interesting to me is the use of TV as an instrument of entertainment surveillance, and the name that plays on that. We get increasingly worried by nasty big-government snooping, data trails, and omnipresent security cams, but at the same time entertain ourselves with reality TV, online journals, phonecams and webcams.