Team Nice Blog

DOUBLETHINK

23-06-2007

Can you solve the problem of anti-social behaviour just by being courteous to people? The good folk at Team Nice think so. You can judge for yourself when they visit the Cotteridge Community Festival on July 7, but in the meantime here’s the latest blog by Pete Mariuki.

The Big Brother silly season has started and this year it seems to have cut straight to the silliness and controversy in record time.

So now seems an appropriate moment for Team Nice to risk potential ridicule and suggest that Big Brother does, with great eloquence and subtlety, deliver a message of huge importance.

No, we have not gone insane.

We actually mean the other Big Brother as seen in the story of Nineteen Eighty Four.

This original Big Brother used many methods to control every aspect of the lives of the society he ruled over, but probably the most significant tool was the manipulation of information and control over education. This was used to devastating effect to keep the masses ignorant and docile.

We have only to read our morning paper to see evidence that similar methods are used every day throughout the real world. This is probably one of the main reasons why a free and open press & media, is widely seen as an essential fixture of any free society.

So perhaps that subtle and eloquent message might be something like this.

We may not like what they do sometimes, but we give great power to the media because we know that we really need them.

Of course there’s another message that immediately follows on from that one.

With great power comes great responsibility.

If we’re talking about Social Responsibility (and this is Team Nice so…) then some may think that this starts to have a real significance with newspapers and television channels.

The media’s choices regarding their output, have subtle and far reaching effects on what we see as ‘the real world’ and how we see the people that we share that world with.

You could say that there exists an ever - present question. That question being…

‘Does this reflect the truth about the real world’?

Which sort of brings us right back to Big Brother.

And yes… this time we mean the silly one.

Also published at www.londonist.com