Posts tagged Big Brother

In the post-post-9/11 world, can reality television deliver us from evil? Big Brother, please take notes…

Seven years ago, I had very little presence in the digital sphere. As an oldschool comms marketer who was eager to cross over into the future – and, yes, as a writer with a little audience looking to find a big audience – the potential of the online world called to me with tempting stories of little people with big websites. And I was late to the party. By the time I got there, it was already a little like a Corey Worthington bash – the press, similarly to their ridiculous stories of businessmen who made it big from their garage (we liked those, didn’t we?), often toted around success stories of talents who had been “stumbled upon” online; but in the now crowded cybersea, nobody was being stumbled upon, because nobody was able to sit there in anyone’s way to be stumbled upon. But I knew enough from my marketing background to understand what this meant  - you had to be connected to something else, something big, something commercial, that people were quite deliberately stumbling into, and, through association, there you were. I needed to write about something everyone was talking about – or reading about – online. And I needed to write about something that also gave me the vehicle to slip in the same things I’d be writing about, anyway – disguised as discussions not about those concerns (psychosocial concerns, a the end of the day), but of the topic du jour. I investigated commercial hitrates, did a bit of cybersurfing, and found what I thought was too good a vehicle for Aaron Darc to be true: Big Brother. Aaron Darc meet reality television. Whether you like it or not.

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