Over the last twenty years the multiplying demands of media outlets have created a demand for new celebrities. In place of the old order of movie stars and aristocrats in 'diaries' is a new breed of soap actors, reality TV stars, models and those simply 'famous for being famous' in gossip columns. These new celebrities, variously described as the D or Z List often comprise ordinary people. The argument here is that the treatment of such people on the D-List is illustrative of the ways in which the media seek to patrol our behaviour and offer lessons about knowing one's place. The distinctions made between real and bogus is connected to the machines of celebrity and the commodification of the self.

Foucault defined government as the calculated direction of human conduct, the means by which behavior is shaped to various ends by the expertise in myriad agencies of the state. This article explores the theme of conduct by considering Big Brother as an experiment in governance. It is important to consider the new surveillance context in which documentaries take place. Of particular note is the way in which documentaries are seeing social issues as a means of getting to the personal and emotive. This new focus has also entailed a fascination with the psychological. Big Brother stimulated a number of debates concerning the rights and responsibilities of television producers to the subjects. It is also important to consider the ways in which the subjects of the program used the experience as an opportunity to develop their sense of self as performers and subjects in process.

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Since its launch in 1999, Big Brother has become that rare cultural phenomenon that brings the role of television and new media into the heart of public debate. Devised by Jon De Mol in The Netherlands, the Big Brother "project" was soon one of the most successful franchises in television history. As a sociocultural phenomenon, it inspired much discussion about the meaning and function of television and the internet at the turn of the century. In this issue, we attempt to put the series into context by presenting a series of papers that reflect on its success. Our aim is to connect the program to the larger shifts within television in what John Corner describes in this issue as postdocumentary culture.One of the first questions that arises concerns the question of genre: what exactly is Big Brother? A documentary, a game show, or a psychological experiment? Perhaps the safest answer is to say that Big Brother is a typical product of our commercially oriented age in being a hybrid, a combination of various genres designed to maximize audiences. Like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, what makes the format such a creative business proposition is that it has been imported into countries where their own national characteristics can be revealed.The newness of the format has passed some critics by. Instead they choose to fulminate about the role of television as a corrupting influence on both those watching and those participating. In this version, Big Brother represents a further "dumbing-down" of culture. In many ways, it is seen as a more damaging form of "reality TV." Critics argue that the production and consumption of such an exploitative program does not reflect well on any nation that screens it. In France, police used tear gas to disperse protestors who believed that the show undermined public morals. As Ernst Mathijs shows in his article on critical responses to Big Brother in Belgium, 251

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