At 2 AM after a very long day at work, I sat down to write my first blog entry for Diggin Deeper. But being a compulsive multi-tasker, I got into an argument while chatting on the go. My friend was telling me that I needed to blog personal incidents. All people are voyeurs; they are more interested in other people’s lives, he claimed. But I wasn’t convinced, wasn’t the internet a source of information with a capital I, besides blogs are about opinions?
This incident made me a bit uncomfortable, which lead to some pondering and scribbling.The word ‘Voyeur’ was originally the name of a disorder of watching unsuspecting people for sexual arousal. The negative connotation has stuck with it, so my first reaction like most people was: something must be seriously wrong if we are all turning into voyeurs?
Whether it is watching home videos uploaded on youtube.com, browsing people’s online photo-albums, reading their personal commentaries on blogs, following dramatized life-stories on Reality shows, all around us is an excess of voyeuristic behavior. The TV Show ‘Big Brother’(Big Boss in India) is a classic case, five pan-regional versions of this massively successful reality show are screened in continents all over the world. On Big Brother, a bunch of people agree to be under constant surveillance during their stay at a communal house. They are ousted one by one by popularity votes and the last one in the game wins a prize.
Looks like the vision of Orwell in 1984 has become a reality today!
It’s quite powerful, the feeling of seeing everything and yet it is completely mundane. There is more to this: What does it mean to be a voyeur? Is this desire to sneak a peek something that today’s technologies have afforded us? Is it because we can publish whatever we want that voyeurism is being fed or is it the other way round? Are people living all their desires vicariously through these acts of voyeurism?
Beat this: One of these days I stumbled on a comment on a blog that said:
“I loved taking a peek inside your mind and life.” (!!)
Check out: Cartoons about voyeurs. 514 pictures tagged voyeurism
4 comments:
The tendency to watch has always been there, hasn't it? Its just that the barriers of individuals wrt to the access they allow to different people has come down.... We put up online profiles (the most basic of public posturing, forget youtube and flickr or second life etc..) to give a people a zeitgeist of us. Something they can look at and move on without being too boring...
"About me:" is a question nobody (or very few) should be able to answer oneself ... But everyone seemingly is certain!
We look into others lives to see whether they have failings similar to ours... and relish at their failure and ogle at their victories... Big brother is not around... Its U!
I used to believe that blogs are nothing but useless Dear Diary entries. Well at some level they still are.
If we don't write about ourselves, we do write about what we think of certain things. I personally don't think it hides one's personality anyway. We get to know a person either through what happens to them or through what they say they believe in. So how different is it to write about issues that surround you?
Maybe a little more open , an act of looking out. But that doesn't make it any better or is that how we define it?
~Twin
a.g.sudarshan:Thanks for bringing that up, I did come across this while I was researching for this dig on voyeurism. There is definitely a link between exhibitionism and voyeurism, the more exhibitionist people become there is more to be seen, hence the excess voyeurism. But my concern here is that there is no causal link between the two. Exhibitionism is not needed for voyeurism to exist. As for people being voyeuristic, I don’t know how long this tendency to watch has existed. Is it peculiar to a generation? Since the various surveillance tools have become prevalent maybe?
Twin: What are blogs? They are slates where people scribble, express, and shout out.
And like all forms of expression (art, dance, fiction) they are open to interpretation.
We all write within our own sense of privacy, choosing and revealing what we feel comfortable. Knowing what people are going through and what they believe in is very different though.
I am interested in the ‘dear dairy entries’ that you mentioned. To me this is interesting precisely because as far as I can remember people wrote down in dairies their secrets, things they are mortified to share with the world. Tucked away in a few pages are those secret longings, hurts, pains, or passionate poems which don’t rhyme. But on the front page of the dairy would be a scrawl that said: Please do not read this. Respect my privacy et al. Why then are people open to this idea of sharing with the world on something as ubiquitous as the internet? Let’s save this discussion for another day!
When I go to the U.K. and see snippets of Big Brother on the news and tabloids, I see a nation too engrossed in other personal lives. Weird personal lives. A satisfaction I think people get when they watch Jerry Springer. People thinking atleast theyre not that weird, their problems aint anything.
I too like watching people. (And in Morocco it takes a whole new height when chairs at coffee shops all face the street. :) ) But I'm interested in the intricacies of human behaviour. Cause and effect and those kind of things.And yes the marvel at the Omnipotent who makes in this world the orderly chaos that works like a Swiss-made clock!
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