ABSTRACT
In 1949 British author George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel that told of a future totalitarian society. Like his Animal Farm that had appeared 4 years earlier, the new book marked Orwell’s continued disenchantment with political regimes based on ideological foundations that attempted to govern all aspects of the private and public lives of its citizens. To symbolize the constant surveillance of his fictional citizens of the future Orwell coined the catchphrase ‘Big Brother is Watching’. Orwell himself had no opportunity of seeing whether his fictions would come to pass, dying as he did in 1950. The year 1984 came and went, and on the surface at least the novel’s prophecies had not eventuated. Instead, in 1999, a half-century after the novel’s appearance, Big Brother did happen, although in circumstances very different to those imagined by Orwell. In an ironic twist the Dutch programme Big Brother offered television viewers the opportunity to watch the activities of a small group of young people who had deliberately made themselves available to the constant surveillance of a battery of cameras and microphones. The success of the first version of the programme prompted the remaking of the format in over thirty different national settings across the world as television producers and broadcasters, as well as audiences, fell under its spell.
