Nineteen Eighty-Four? Yes, please

Wednesday, 25th March 2009

The Spectator on the life and death of reality TV star Jade Goody

Jade Goody was propelled to a very strange form of modern stardom by the reality TV show Big Brother, and even learned of the cancer that finally claimed her life last weekend on the Indian version of that programme. The title of the show was Orwellian. But what the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism.

In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed upon them by the totalitarian state. The controversy over Google Street View in recent days has been more than matched by excitement at the technological wizardry that enables us to see eye-level panoramic images of places all over the world. It is a service provided by an internet search giant, not a sinister intrusion by the Thought Police. Orwell envisaged language drained of poetry and passion by the state’s imposition of Newspeak. In the event, it was the citizens themselves who invented this lifeless shorthand, in the text language that now routinely appears in the examination papers of our teenagers. As for the Junior Spies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, today’s children are already culturally primed to berate their parents for smoking, breaching environmental guidelines, or buying products that are not Fairtrade. The state does not have to get involved.

What Orwell thought would be coerced has happened voluntarily. But what would have amazed and appalled him most is the cult of celebrity which promises the most ordinary, untalented people fame in return for unfettered access to their lives. That is what the real Big Brother did for Jade Goody. In the novel, Winston Smith is told by his torturer O’Brien that ‘posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history.’ Jade was promised and granted, in death, precisely the opposite by the real Big Brother. It is an outcome much stranger than the imagining of any novelist.

Sine labore nihil

March 26th, 2009 11:24am Report this comment

So will people still talk about Jade Goody in a hundred years time the same way people talk about Mozart, Abraham Lincoln or Marie Curie? I somehow don't think so.

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