In the tense moments when they are forced to nominate each other for eviction, the lab rats of the Big Brother house sing: "It's only a game show, it's only a game show." But is it? Or is Big Brother something far more sinister?
It's a glamorous concentration camp where hell is other people, and where prison guards are replaced by 28 cameras and 60 microphones, with the ultimate punishment being public shame and humiliation.
It's a psychological high-wire act, where the pleasure comes in anticipating the fall.
It's a celebration of the new public recreation of webcam voyeurism, where millions of people click on to thousands of websites exposing the lives of people who have turned themselves into peep shows. AnaCam, JenniCam and DotComGuy are wholesome compared to their blatantly pornographic counterparts, dormcam, peepcam, upskirtcam, peniscam and even toiletcam.
It's a form of sadomasochism, exploring issues of power and control. The power of Big Brother, the power of the inmates over each other, the power of the viewer over the inmates and, terrifyingly, the insidious power over us all of a global Big Brother we have hardly even begun to know.
It is seductive, psychological pornography, desensitising and dehumanising the viewer through its merciless exposure of "contestants", whose travails we, the viewers, are expected to intimately but unempathetically observe. To reinforce this feeling that we are all social scientists, rather than sleazy voyeurs, Big Brother's pop psychologists analyse the contestants' behaviour in a bastardisation of psychology.
It's nothing more than a 21st-century version of the Roman colosseum, where Christians being fed to lions are replaced by "contestants" eaten alive by the insatiable media machine.
Big Brother is all these things. And I find it irresistible. I am mesmerised by it. I was hooked from episode one. I watch six nights a week and log on to the activities of Big Brother through the website, with its blurry, shifting "streaming" of video images. Staring into my 12x18-inch PC screen, I catch glimpses of Claire in the shower. I don't like myself for it.
But I'm not alone. At Dublin Zoo last weekend, as children watched animals in cages and enclosures, I eavesdropped on parents who stood around discussing Big Brother - "the human zoo", as it was described by a senior member of the Church of England.
They discussed it in terms of a soap opera plot - asking each other if they'd seen Nasty Nick's humiliation by the Irishman Thomas, and wondering aloud if "sexy Mel" would ever stop flirting and bed one of her fellow inmates. They asked each other who they thought would survive the longest and win the sterling £70,000 - the Irish lesbian ex-novice Anna, perhaps? They relished the prospect of an Irish Big Brother, being mooted by Magma films, a Galway production company, bringing the possibility of the Republic's first experience of "reality" TV.
But what is reality, anymore? When the new inmate, the delicious Claire, replaced the disgraced Nick - who was ejected for plotting to control the in-house nomination process - she made a telling comment. Sitting in the private interview room, after her first hours as an inmate, she told Big Brother that she felt like "the child who has reached into the TV and grabbed the chocolate bar".
For five weeks Claire, a media babe who is so obsessed with her own appearance that she sports silicone breast-implants, had been watching Big Brother along with the rest of us. She knew intellectually that it was "real" - and yet she hadn't "realised" emotionally that it was "real". It was only when she walked across the bridge from the outside world into the Big Brother house and met the contestants face-to-face, rather than through cameras, that she understood how "real" it was. She was suddenly hit by the emotionally intelligent perception that the contestants were flesh and blood people who were feeling their way through a weirdly traumatic experience.
It's like that question: when a tree falls in the woods where there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? When the exhibitionistic Big Brother contestants strut and mope and flirt and have late-night conversations and express their anxiety about being exposed, nobody feels for their predicament.
If we don't feel for them, do they have feelings? Are they real? Would we really care if - as with the blatantly exploitative Jerry Springer show in the US - one of them was murdered? Nasty Nick asked that very question before he was expelled. There are voyeuristic videos - snuff movies - where people are really murdered for sexual titillation and entertainment. And on TV news, we see death all the time. Yet because these images don't seem real, few of us are moved to react beyond tut-tutting as we change the channel.
I am one of those people who tells myself I cannot care. That I am powerless and there is nothing I can do about these images. So what does it say about me? About all of us?
In Nazi Germany, lots of people knew what was going on and kept quiet because they felt powerless. Psychologist, author and media commentator Marie Murray believes this is why Big Brother is so disturbing. She sees this game show as "an appalling abuse of people" like a concentration camp where, in order to survive, inmates are forced to betray each other.
Big Brother contestants can only survive on a daily basis by befriending, supporting and co-operating with each other, yet in order to survive in the long term, they must nominate each other for eviction until only one of them is left. "It's a test of survival - survival on the foot of betrayal," Murray says.
Nasty Nick likened the psychological cannibalism of Big Brother to British public school and survival in the City. People behave like this all the time, not just on TV.
Defenders of the format say that these young people knew what they were getting into. But did they? Murray points out that none of the contestants could anticipate the consequences because no one in human history had ever participated in this experiment. The contestants are vulnerable to this abuse, having been primed by popular entertainment values to believe that fame and image are the supreme rewards and that TV is the ultimate act of self-definition: I'm on TV, therefore I am.
The contestants cuddle, hug and massage each other's bodies and egos - all the while keeping themselves psychologically detached by seeing each other as two-dimensional figures.
That's why this week's "challenge" was wickedly apt. As the contestants went about their business of coping with exposure, a buzzer occasionally sounded. They had 60 seconds to rush to the garden and look for photographs of fellow contestants being held over the prison walls on a stick. One hundred faces appeared over 48 hours and the contestants had to memorise the names in perfect order so that, when asked by Big Brother, they could recite them perfectly. If they failed, they would lose 50 per cent of their food budget. The post-modern irony was obvious: Threatened with physical starvation, the contestants could survive only by their knowledge of each other. Yet that very experience of being together in the house is one of emotional starvation, because the contestants must always remain involved yet detached from each other, living in three dimensions but knowing each other in two.
Seeing their own two-dimensional faces on sticks were reminders that they have been reduced to media cyphers.
But what is all this doing to us, the viewers? There's no doubt recreational voyeurism brings out the worst in us. Marie Murray fears that we've reached the stage where "if we could have had a camera on that Russian sub we would have".
Big Brother may be most sinister in that it offers false reassurance that only the 11 contestants have been silly enough to become the victims of this game, while we, the audience, remain comfortably immune, superior in our objectivity. In truth, we are all being watched.
This is the future: sitting in cubicles in front of our PCs watching webcams watching other people, while webcams attached to our PCs watch us.
ALREADY this is happening. There are insidious privacy-invading software programmes distributed through the Net by shadowy organisations that are spying on us through our PCs. These programmes sneak onto our hard drives and steal constant streams of information about our surfing habits. They can even collect information - including webcam images - when our PCs are turned off.
There are even Websites - such as BrainBlitz.com - that let you spy on what other people are doing. You can amuse yourself by watching other people's thought processes as they type in "key words". One example that I found the other night went like this: dancing+baby . . . happy+puppy . . . picturepost . . . adult+stories . . . models . . . jennicam . . . tori+amos . . . continental+airlines . . . geneology . . . linux . . . f*** . . . thumbnail+gallery+post. The story was all there: a surfer had started out looking for the dancing babies and ended by downloading pornographic images. As an insight into human nature, it cannot be beat.
We've become so used to spying on each other that small towns around the Republic are competing to be the first to have CCTV and complain when they don't have it. As violence and street attacks increase on our streets, human decency is no longer enough to monitor behaviour. We insist on having the neutral eye of the camera. Yet in the US, where CCTV is most rampant, state legislatures are being forced to pass webcam privacy laws in an attempt to stave off a complete breakdown in boundaries between the individual and the Net.
We're snooped-on every time we use a bank or a credit card or a telephone. Our bills tell the stories of our lives: where we've travelled, what we've bought, where we ate, who we talked to. Soon, genetic tests will be able to tell us the diseases we will live and die with and insurance companies will categorise our risk levels from birth.
The joy and pain of being an unpredictable individual will have disappeared. We will all be depressingly malleable in the hands of the Big Brothers of media, multinational business and gene technology. We will ultimately be judged by our abilities to be canny contestants in a global game of Big Brother.
It's already too late to stop the process. We, Neros of the TV colosseum, have fiddled while our society and culture have descended into voyeuristic decay where human life is valued only for the entertainment it gives.