Live Transmission: Revisiting 'The Truman Show' in a Panoptic World

Seen at the time of its release as a poignant critique of reality television and the entertainment industry, Peter Weir's 1998 film has developed an entirely different resonance in the age of internet surveillance, targeted advertising and ubiquitous social media. As James Robert Douglas contends, the film's visual language, gender politics and representation of the panopticon are all worth revisiting twenty years on.

Additional keywords:
Talking Society, middle years, senior secondary, television, reality TV, Big Brother, pay TV, YouTube, gender, power, capitalism, Michel Foucault, Nerve, Jim Carrey