Reality TV and projected reality : a case study of Australian Big Brother's Merlin Luck

In 2004, on the Australian Big Brother TV show, one of the contestants made a protest about Australia's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers. When housemate Merlin Luck was evicted, he staged a protest that caused a major controversy. This subverted the format of reality TV and exposed the boundaries of Big Brother's simulation of reality. His protest was an example of Baudrillard's simulacra, where a representation of the real becomes so divorced from it's subject that it becomes hyperreal. Merlin's dissent was a "culture jam," a mode of activism targetting and transforming mass media to produce negative commentary about itself. Rather than walk out of the house, amid cheering fans, to discuss the good and bad parts of his experience, he violated protocol by refusing to speak and projecting a contradictory persona