Big Brother
Big Brother has been a big hit since it came to the screens but also has had it’s controversial times which caused channel 4 and many members of the public a lot of offense and trouble. One event that got out of hand was the racial abuse of Jade Goody towards Shilpa Shetty. To me it was an arguement that got out of hand and also the fact that the two of them clashed as they had nothing in common and chose not to get along. Once they had separated themselves from one another they began to take parts of each other and abuse verbally but Jad Goody not knowing what she was doing to her reputation made her become a racist along with another few housemates.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=SPew_SyG6As
After watching the clip it makes you also see the power of peer pressure and how all of a sudden parts of the house pulled themselves to one side forming a group against Shilpa. I find that Big Brother is an entertaining show but the producer does not have all control of what happens in the house and that once it is blown out of proportion and should have another type of approach to it that will still entertain the viewers but not put the housemates at risk.
‘The Stanford Experiment’ in 1971 should have proved that people can lose control and things could get out hand when a roll is given to particular people and they go by it even if they know they don’t have to. The Stanford experiment was about a group of researchers that built a prison cell environment beneath their university and began to adapt the roles that they were given. After six days into the experiment it had to be put to a stop as it was getting out of hand and becoming dangerous for the researchers. As they played their roles as expected the prisoners did not fight back as the guards went hard on them as they were forfilling their roles.
Once looking into the experiment I found a website that details the experiment thoroughly about how they went about to set up the experiment to the conclusions of the experiment. It is in a process of how Big Brother works, such as selecting your subjects to who is the most suitable to be in the experiment and the most entertaining to be in the show and the conclusion would come to who is the most patient in the prison to be let off of being punished to who holds the best character to be able to win the show and be accepted by the public.
Even though big brother has psychologists to support the show and it’s housemates I find that things were not thought out properly as they put the wrong characters in together which created one of the world’s biggest controversy’s that will always be remembered. The problem with big brother is that only the attack on Shilpa Shetty was foucused on and not the whole idea of isolating a group of people who are capable of doing anything in a house that they have no official power over.
