Reality Games and Soft Control

I wonder it was only me that had to think that reality game in Terranova’s description and our “real” lives, regardless of on or off line, are not much different with each other. Let me compare reality games and our lives. Also see p. 127 for more details.

1. Reality games demand the impossible from their willing participants. - I think so many people who have gone through neo-liberal changes in their society or workplaces would say similarly from their experiences.
2. They relinquish their privacy by being continuously placed under the surveillance gaze of a camera – I am so happy we do not have surveillance camera in the library because at least whether or not study is under my decision, not anybody else’s. It is no secret that companies install surveillance camera not only because for security but for surveillance of employees. Not to mention, online itself is a jungle of surveillance.
3. Reality games demand then a self that is stripped down to the capacity to collaborate and punishments and rewards – This is exactly what Dilbert talks about everyday and exactly what many people at workplaces experience. Online? It depends on which side you stand on. I feel I am continuously stripped down while online. To many people it is reality that they have to delete cookies and stored passwords when they stop browsing the Internet. What about information society at large? If I say that anyone should give up privacy and individuality to live in an information society, will it be too much?

Terranova makes a statement: “The group dynamics that are engendered by the distribution of the space, the set of initial and the rules applied by a transcendent entity (Big Brother’s voice…) produce a kind of ‘emergent entertainment.’

I think she is saying in this analogy that we all are participants in an emergent entertainment, a reality game, entitled “network society.” To join the reality show, you have to surrender to the rules of the game. You have to repeatedly confess your feelings to the camera. You are under surveillance while even sleeping. While many of us can rationalize and glamourize our experience of being in an emergent entertainment of “biological computing,” we are under soft control of Big Brother. So, we are n the “unhappiness factory.” I think the reality game analogy make lots of sense, at least to me.