[This just kind of came out stuff I can’t really articulate properly, I’m sure someone will at some point though. Possibly doesn’t make a great deal of sense, probably I’m being a bit paranoid]

I noticed the first Big Brother blip-vert over the weekend. Those barely-liminal flashes of the logo they sneak in between commercials for hair products and diet plans.

It’s wierd how the term ‘Big Brother’ has switched from being primarily about fear of being under constant observation (which is pretty much the state we’re in) to being more about constantly observing others, specifically a bunch of idiots in a house, splashed across every media outlet for the whole summer*.

I guess that’s the way it works though, Orwell predicted the ends just not the means, it’s not like anyone is coalating all the CCTV footage and phonecam pics and youtube videos into some big database, there’s too much so we all have to do our little bit of observation. It works like del.icio.us works to catalogue the web, everybody watches everybody else, dutifully tags and catalogues everything for easy searching, facilitated by the all seeing Face Book feeds and the stalkertastic Flickr photostream (my feeling here is that privacy should be the default rather than something you have to switch on, but then you’re not adding the same value to Flickr so they’re not going to do that) and Google reader. For a while now I’ve been thinking it’s getting a bit much the number fo digital cameras held aloft at gigs, people want to record everything, I suppose things like Last.fm are part of it too. Can’t remeber who said it but the following (mis?)quote has been stuck in my head for the last 6 or seven years now:

I always worried about someone holding a big database on every detail of everything I do. I never thought I’d be filling it in myself.

Distributed observation community, so web 2.0.

Goz has some typically astute reflections on the cameras at gigs thing in this ATP post***

So when I think about it I don’t find it particularly surprising that Yahoo et al. are the ones that are propping up cencorship and turning in dissidents in places like China.

*At least Big Brother pretty much guarantees that I disengage with C4 and the tabloid media for the duration of its run, can only be a good thing. Kind of reminds me of the “Why Don’t You?”. Theme tune appropriately “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?” . Anyway, series 2 of the INCOMPARABLY AMAZING The Wire should be arriving today so that should see us through to winter**

** Seriously, you need to watch The Wire, I keep meaning to write something about it but it’s too imense for me to deal with in any format other than a drunken pub based eulogy. Basically its about the internal politics of Baltimore PD vs a drug gang (who have a significanlty more functional organisation) and their structural pathologies.

*** My favourite bit

before Mogwai went on stage to headline Friday’s lineup, their sound engineer pointed at a couple of girls and black guy standing near the front and said: ‘Would you, you and you mind moving back a bit please. The first ten rows are reserved for white boys staring at guitar pedals.’