An awful lot of the discussion generated by Big Brother, and a lot of its own presentation, focuses on the cutting-edge technology that makes it possible.
In truth, there's a bit of hype involved in all that (surprise, surprise). Much of what we see in a Big Brother programme is based on the old technology of one-way mirrors with camera operators hidden behind them. There are also some tiny automated cameras in use, of course, but they tend to give us the funny-looking grey images.
There is, however, one element of the Big Brother package which could scarcely have been imagined five or 10 years ago. Just type www.channel.com/ bigbrother into your web browser and, in addition to the usual odd, obscure or outdated rubbish that tends to accumulate on most websites, you can watch the activities in the Big Brother house live - provided your computer can run the free and easily downloaded Real Player software required to relay the images from the cameras.
The site has been attracting more than 100,000 unique users every day, to see - well, to see stuff that's much more boring than watching the edited highlights in the evening. (And it's not quite truly "live": the good people at Channel 4 have someone censoring the web feed to keep it more or less clean.)
It's a big attraction, big enough to attract whingeing from employers who reckon it's costing them millions. Ten days ago a British research company, Websense, claimed the costs to British businesses of employees accessing the Big Brother website has been running at £1.4 million sterling a week, or an average of around £300,000 a day. Not to be outdone, Irish businesses a few days later came out with a similar claim (£30,000 a day here) and with equally little evidence for that precise figure.
Workers may be logging on to Big Brother, but there's every chance if Big Brother weren't there they'd be snatching the bit of leisure time another way. It seems businesses may be using the Big Brother hype to try to impose some limits on employees' Internet use at the office: other Websense figures claim that 70 per cent of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the nine-to-five working day; that 30 to 40 per cent of Internet surfing is not business-related; and that more than 60 per cent of online purchases are made in work.
In fairness, watching streamed video does use more bandwidth than most other forms of websurfing. But video is becoming increasingly common across the Internet. The webcam has been around for years now, and many users, pre-Big Brother, had the idea to turn the camera on themselves and show the world their ordinary lives. (Irish student site oxygen.ie is introducing No54, showing flatland living, later this month.) The real difference with the Big Brother website, with its TV platform for publicity, is that it can plaster itself with lots of paid advertising.
