To The Next Level

I confess. I watch Pinoy Big Brother with such fastidious religiosity I could put to shame my grandmother’s pious devotion to her saints.

I’m sure The Powers That Be (ie, the producers) would be very pleased with me. And why not? By ten in the evening, I drop everything and dash in front of the television, digesting the mush of visual images they serve night after night.

Some of the people I know never miss an opportunity to express their derision about the show. I simply smile, and tell them my reasons: for instance, that the show makes for good material for social commentary; or that it provides an avenue for the examination of the crisscrosses between George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984, and its modern-day, capitalist interpretation—namely, reality television. Four years of law school is good training for intellectualizing the inane and justifying the frivolous.

This, however, I find hard to justify: The Calgary Herald has reported that there are 3.2 million CCTV cameras all over Britain. A company called Internal Eyes figured a way to make cash from these CCTV’s. According to the report, “It bills itself as ‘an online instant event notification system’ that will allow viewers to anonymously monitor random video feeds streamed from privately owned establishments. Viewers in this case are people. Events are crimes, imagined or real. And the instant event notification system must be the object of desire for every generalissimo in the world, aspiring or real.”

Charles Farrier is correct when he said, “(Internal Eyes) is a private company using private cameras and asking private citizens to spy on each other."

What happened to the right to privacy? What happened to the right to be left alone?

This is Big Brother to the next level. And it isn’t fun.

Ralph Vincent Catedral
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