CBS was planning to run four original "Big Brother" house half-hour segments a week, at 22 minutes each. There were 10 residents; it followed that the most air time each could expect out of their seven thoroughly filmed 24-hour days was a notch over eight minutes: Ten, if they're lucky.

Of course, there's also the live Thursday-night episode, and a lot of the time more than one resident is onscreen. Still, Jamie, who has not told her housemates she graduated with a 4.0 average, had a point. CBS is generating hundreds of hours of footage a week out of the house, and only a tiny fraction is actually being broadcast. A lot of people have figured out that "Big Brother" is best seen not as a television program, but as a 24/7 cluster of webcasts with a sometimes illuminating, sometimes obfuscatory televised adjunct.

Take the hours-long game of Truth or Dare the housemates played late last Wednesday night. CBS ran only a fleeting clip. The announcer said the first question was directed at Jordan, the triathlete and former stripper. George, the genial blue-collar dad, asked her who she was attracted to when she first entered the house, and we saw Jordan reply, "Two women and two men, and one of the names is Brittany."

The broadcast told a lie: Jordan was far from the first person questioned. CBS made George's interest in her predilections look pretty dodgy, where in reality George hadn't even heard of the game before he was asked if he'd ever cheated on his wife. (He didn't even have to consider the Dare component: George, you'll be relieved to hear, has never cheated.) He came up with the attraction question because it had already been used by others.

You also didn't see Jordan go through what must have been a 15-minute negotiation process, trying to whittle the question down into something she was willing to answer. She avoided answering a male name, except for cheerfully saying that she was no longer attracted to outspoken William, now that she saw him as a friend -- she tried to get off the hook with that non-answer but the housemates insisted she answer some version of the actual question.

Jordan then was careful to broaden her definition of "attraction" as widely as possible for the answer she gave. Since then, she's explained to virtually every other woman in the house that when she says she finds women attractive, she's not saying she's "a total bisexual." The actual Truth or Dare session revealed a Jordan more insecure, self-concealing and manipulative than Jordan herself seemed comfortable with.

Very different from the bada-bing-bada-boom television version.

If you just watch the show on television, you also didn't see why "Naked trampoline!" has become a house catchphrase. You didn't see unhappy housewife Karen asked by self-professed black role model William about the time and circumstances of her first orgasm. The penalty for non-answer would be to hand over her cigarettes to William. ("Now that's how you play Truth or Dare," he said to George.)

Karen, the mom, embarrassed, told a story of being "fingered" in the front seat of her senior boyfriend's car, in her driveway, when she was a sophomore: The next day she said that had been a lie. "A lie? I didn't know we could lie! I would've lied!" cried little magenta-haired Brittany (who has made a lot of money in the stock market, and rents out half the duplex she owns -- did you know that?)

"I needed my cigarettes," Karen said.

Meanwhile, Karen and George, the house elders, went outside during the second round and talked about the importance of witnessing your faith. (She thinks people could go to hell if they don't; he's less worried that God would do that.) Eddie is the only person in the house who doesn't seem to be religious (lost his faith when he lost his leg). That's one of the unexpected questions "Big Brother" has raised for me: Is this representative of the amount of religious discourse among most Americans?

The media-savvy housemates wonder frequently to each other what's going out on the Internet, and what's being edited into television. They have little to go on -- just a few ideas from the featurettes the show created to introduce them to viewers on the premiere episode. Brittany, it turns out, felt odd being filmed going to church: She's a spiritual person, but she doesn't attend church. When Cassandra, the thoughtful U.N. worker, told Curtis, the young All-American Asian lawyer, that CBS had wanted to shoot her inline skating (she means to take lessons and in the meantime "didn't want to look like an idiot" skating awkwardly), he said, "They were desperate for Rollerblading! They asked me to skate for them."

They're guessing wrong about the Internet feed, though. They think we just get one long shot per room on our computers. When they leave, one by one, they'll see we're getting everything, including close-ups, edited in real time.

Jordan, in particular, obsesses about the broadcast. Until she told her housemates Saturday night about her stripping background, she phrased this over and over in ominously vague terms: "There are things about my past that America knows and you don't know, and I don't know how they're representing it. I don't know how they're editing me. They could show Mega rubbing my foot when I was lying there having my mask done and make me look totally slutty."

(Actually, instead of that, the network showed a short clip of William massaging her foot in a dark room, via infrared photography. They've also shown footage making it look like there's chemistry between her and Josh, though if they'd shown more of that kitchen conversation, you would have heard her tell him, "I'm not going to hook up with anyone in this house" in a tone any woman would recognize as the diplomatic way of saying, "I'm not going to hook up with you.")

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