::fibreculture:: Everyone's a winner, as Big Brother returns

[molly hankwitz]

Thought this article had an interesting take on voting, TV and democracy...
Fyi, Molly

___
Everyone's a winner: As Big Brother returns to our screens, the gimmicks of 
reality TV are being used to revive public interest in politics. Is this 
the ultimate parody of democracy?
By Sam Brenton, June 9, 2003, New Statesman Ltd


In 416BC - 2,406 years before the first eviction-based reality game show - 
Hyperbolus was voted out of Athens by his peers. It was an example of the 
institution of ostracism, an old version of direct democracy, introduced in 
Athenian society at the end of the sixth century BC. Each year a vote was 
taken as to whether an eviction would take place. If the vote was passed 
each voter put into an urn a potsherd (ostrakon) marked with the name of 
someone he wished ostracised. The man most often named on the ostraka was 
exiled, unless fewer than 6,000 votes were cast. It was a way for the 
community to get rid of whichever Nasty Nick was irritating them that year.

Such crude expressions of the public will are part of the heritage of 
democracy, and it is clear from the millions of text and phone votes cast 
in each series of Big Brother that the impulse it satisfies is alive and well.

Since Big Brother whet the nation's appetite for ostracism, the voting 
systems in reality TV have become increasingly labyrinthine. Carlton TV's 
now-defunct Survivor - a game of chess to Big Brother's snakes and ladders 
- employed a range of little parodies of democracy, with two almost 
party-political factions initially conspiring against each other, and then 
with peers voting to evict each other at 'tribal council', where they 
literally put names into an urn. As contestants were evicted by their 
peers, so they formed a jury, another democratic gift from Athens, which 
would sit on the final night to pass decisive judgement on their erstwhile 
rivals. The system made Belgian proportional representation seem 
straightforward, and viewers generally preferred the harmless sadism of Big 
Brother's straight eviction vote. (Appropriately, however, in the US - 
cradle of voter apathy - the public vote was abandoned after the first 
series for lack of interest, in favour of a Survivor-esque all-against-all.)

Lesser shows such as Eden and Cruel Winter, desperate to compensate for 
their dreary formats by ladling out interactive opportunity to the 
audience, have asked viewers to vote for various nasty forfeits, meals and 
other treats.

By now you have probably heard or read somewhere the claim that reality TV 
is more popular than party politics. Certainly, public delight in it is 
louder, and the media can cover its carnival of mock-democracy with a sense 
of commercial relish rather than duty. But while such assertions are 
catchy, and suit the 'end of culture' fatalism in which we Brits love to 
luxuriate, the alarmism is not matched by accuracy. Democratic 
participation has some kick left in it yet, as this year's anti-war 
protests showed. We still know the difference between real and fake, and 
between a vote and a popularity contest.

The problem is that some sections of the media do not seem to be able to 
see the difference, and hope that the allure of reality-TV-style gimmicks 
will bring the viewing public back to serious political programming. There 
are good reasons to be alarmed by the state of our democracy - the turnout 
figures do not lie, and the flickering resurgence of the newly 
'neighbourhood-oriented' British National Party suggests that public memory 
of political history is, to put it politely, flimsy. But the solution to 
this problem is not to try to make participation in politics and community 
more like reality television.

The BBC seems incapable of scoring a bona fide reality-TV hit. The 
ill-fated Castaway appeared before Big Brother first gushed across the 
landscape, and yet was lost in a miasma of flu, arguments about dogs and 
terrible scheduling. But the Beeb now seems intent on using the 
sophisticated interactive elements of the genre to reinvigorate the public 
relationship with politics, community, and itself. Remember its Your NHS 
day (20 February 2002)? This was meant to engage the public in a debate 
about one of the most important topical issues. It was to be informative, 
enjoyable and interactive: Lord Reith meets SMS messaging. As part of this 
event you could vote (much as you do in Big Brother) for the NHS issue that 
you think matters most. 'Free healthcare for the elderly' came tops, but 
what does this prove (apart from indicating that oldies are getting to 
grips with new media technology)?

Well, it tells us about as much as the BBC's Great Britons popularity 
contest did - nothing for certain, and nothing beyond a conversation point. 
The BBC, like newspapers and political parties, commissions opinion polls. 
This was not one of them; a web and phone vote is nothing more than an 
unscientific snapshot of unrepresentative chatter, and its skewed results 
cannot be taken for a representative sampling of opinion. However, it was 
staged as though it were; the BBC web pages about Your NHS day still refer 
to the survey as a 'vote' and carry no disclaimer about the way the data 
was gathered. The 'results' were put to Tony Blair in an interview with 
Nicky Campbell. Reality TV's ethos of interactivity had intruded into 
political life, at the hands of the state-owned channel, at the expense of 
analysis and accurate - as well as more democratic - polling methods.

These techniques are proliferating: we have recently had the BBC's national 
IQ contest Test the Nation; Radio 5 Live experimented with having listeners 
call in to vote for which of three reports they would like to hear; and 
even the Eurovision Song Contest is interpreted as a political event.

Is it a lot of fuss about nothing? Perhaps, but precedent elsewhere 
suggests we are embarking on a highly questionable path. In Argentina last 
year, a reality show called The People's Candidate pit 16 political 
hopefuls against each other; the winner, selected by viewers, contested the 
March 2003 congressional elections. In the US, Rupert Murdoch's FX cable 
network planned to run a similar programme, American Candidate, but setting 
its sights on the White House. The series producer called the show a 
democratic project 'making available to every American who is qualified, by 
virtue of the constitution, the opportunity to run for president'. Last 
month, FX decided not to run the show on the grounds of cost (which had 
apparently grown prohibitively high because of FX's commitment to do the 
democratic process justice). However, the producer still hopes to find a 
home for it, and intends to audition from September. Naturally, the rubric 
of the show mirrors that of US democracy, so candidates have to be US-born 
citizens, who will be aged 35 by 20 January 2005.

American Candidate does not require the winner to contest the election, but 
one senses that the point rather is that they decide to. If it goes ahead, 
and the winner does run, it is not inconceivable that the votes garnered 
could swing a close state or two. It is 40-odd years since television first 
decided a presidential election, in the legendary Nixon-Kennedy debates; if 
next year, we should see a game show elevated to the level of a decisive 
electoral institution, the term 'reality TV', always rather contradictory, 
will have simply made itself redundant - 'reality' and 'television' made 
interchangeable in an ultimate parody of democracy.

TV is good at satirising the real world, but let us resist the temptation 
to turn real life into a parody of TV. And oh, I'm not saying which Big 
Brother housemate's name is scrawled on my ostrakon; the secret ballot is, 
after all, central to the democratic process.

Shooting People: adventures in reality TV by Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen 
is published by Verso (GBP12)