Leaving aside for a moment the utterly barren and bimboesque human landscape that is this year’s Australian series of Big Brother, those of us in cultural and media studies will be more than familiar with the arguments for and against viewing reality TV shows like Big Brother as spaces for the exploration of everyday ethics and/or as interactive spaces for audience engagement. This engagement and exploration occurs not only crudely and explicitly through the voting process, but in an ongoing distributed manner, through loungeroom, watercooler, and online discussions about the relative moral (or aesthetic) worth of the characters onscreen, debates about right actions and human values, and so on. So in some very specific ways, the argument goes, BB inherits and remediates the traditions of the premodern theatre of Shakespeare’s time – a mediated space that was equally robust, unmannered, and interactive. In response, the outraged, ignorant, and/or deliberately obtuse have been heard to cry, “Cultural studies academic argues Big Brother is as good as Shakespeare!!!!!!” .

In stark contrast, this article in The Age by Dirk den Hartog (no, not the explorer, people) is the most lucid critique of the pro-BB media studies position I’ve heard. It’s still a bit snipy towards cultural studies in parts (calling CS researchers ‘enthusiasts’, and ‘populists’, and not in the celebratory way I might employ those terms!). But I am quite convinced by the elegant calls to engage with ethics and historicity in a less one-sided way (eg the comparison with darker forms of premodern entertainments like public hangings and not only the relatively benign Shakespearian comedy as metaphor).