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
