Big Brother - Cartoon Analysis

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Big Brother-Cartoon Analysis

J. Wright contends in his cartoon (The Age 13/5/01) that the public’s craving for constant surveillance anticipates that there is something quite wrong with us. He chooses to portray the public as exhibitionists, who do not care that somebody, “Big Brother”, is watching them 24/7. We see that there are many cameras in each cell, capturing everybody’s moves, and the public does not care. It is only in cell six, with a sign saying: ’Big Brother is ignoring you’, that we see the public upset and throwing tantrums like little children.

Wright shows the public as egocentric. In every cell, there are one or more cameras. In cell three there is a camera at an ATM, for security reasons, where there is a man taking money out of his account and is reading that he is being watched, then automatically thinks that he is now famous. Thinking that we are famous by being watched by a couple of security guards tells us that we are increasingly becoming superficial. When a man is asked and absurd question his reply is, “Of course I’ll answer your inane question – I’ll pull my pants down too if you like.” This asks the reader to accept that our lives are dull and boring, and the only way we can brighten our lives is to watching other people doing their everyday things, even if they are doing their business on the toilet. By criticising the public, and by implicating the readers by doing so in a humorous fashion Wright questions readers whether they are like this.

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Wright further argues that there is something wrong with us by contrasting the ideas in Orwell’s novel 1984 when everybody dreaded “Big Brother” watching them to the present where ‘being watched is no longer our nightmare’.  The people of 1984, as depicted by Wright, dreaded Big Brother watching them. They walked down the streets with worried faces, hunched shoulders and thinking that they had no privacy. On one of the faces of a building in the background there is a poster saying, ‘Big Brother is watching you’, reminding the pedestrians that they are constantly being scrutinised. In the last couple ...

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