Additionally, the "shared viewing experience" phenomenon has relevance with regard to the question
ganesh, what have you learned from viewing big brother?
because the post-Big Brother discussion has taught me rather a lot about my colleagues (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, family and friends) with regard to their attitudes toward race, sex, etc. At the moment, the question "do you think those girls were being racist to Shilpa?" is being asked of me by people who'd never engage with or contribute to a discussion of racism in the abstract, yet it's possible to go on to talk about what we individually recognise as racism, the difference between conscious and unconscious (ignorant/unexamined) prejudice, the degree of overlap of racism and bullying, etc., etc. etc. In the absence of Big Brother I don't think I'd be having these conversations with these people - so it's facilitated my learning about them as people and presumably their learning about me.
This is inevitably a feature of any Big Brother featuring gay people. During last year's run, I was frequently asked, "why don't Richard and Michael get on?" which then lead onto discussion of 'coming out', degrees of self-loathing in gay men and how we cope with that, individual construction of masculinity... and I'm pretty sure at least some of this was enlightening to people who, never having seen groups of openly non-heterosexual people onscreen, imagined that a gay man would automatically like and want to have sex with another gay man (see also Brian and Josh). The fact that I was able to have fairly nuanced discussions around this subject was satisfying to me and, I like to think, a source of 'learning' to others. |
