04.07am in the big brother haus

You know what IS good? Watching Josie from Big Brother repeatedly wash things because she's upset and can't sleep. It isn't really, it just means that I don't have a sleeping pattern and I'm into voyeurism. I forgot to put voyeurism on my list of things, I like the idea of watching people, not necessarily in the crudest of acts... it's just as much fun to watch over the trivial and mundane too. I don't think I would pull out a whole project on Big Brother, it's too boring. Not boring in the sense of contradicting what I just said, I meant the whole charade; the reason I watch it is for the psychology behind it. A lot of people are quick to judge it as tacky and tasteless, and although it is most of the time both of these, it still interests me in the way that you can observe human behaviour. It goes back to the idea of humans loving other humans in distress and discomfort, a sort of seduction into something we don't want to watch, but we feel we have to. Obviously there's never usually anything insanely traumatising on big brother, for legal issues and morality, but it isn't just about the game show and the trials and tribulations of the tasks that is most interesting, it is the house mates themselves.

There's been a lot of concern from the British Psychological Society aimed at the producers of Big Brother because it relies on manipulation and misinformation to get responses from participants. In many cases the activities that happen in the Big Brother house would not be permitted within a contemporary psychological study. Where you would mislead a participant you always need to fully debrief them after and there has to be a valid reason why you would manipulate them. So quite understandably, for psychologists to get involved with Big Brother, they would have the added problem of contributing to endorse something happening on a television programme that they shouldn't be doing in a laboratory experiment.

And that is essentially what it is, an experiment, people forget that it is a social experiment and it has gone from that to in essence, a freak show, the main aim originally was for people to observe other people living normally, but it is a far cry from what it used to be. It's insane, how some things aren't permitted on the show, yet they get away with so much more. And I'm not knocking it, I love it, people sucking their thumbs unknowingly in a confrontational situation, the threshold of the human temper, it's brilliant. I like this idea, the idea of observation, but how would it translate into a product? Throughout all of this research I must put to the front of my mind that it has to evolve into something, a final product, and the only thing I see currently is CCTV, I'm sick of it. The rights, the dangers, who has the power?