After some initial resistance, this clear invasion of the public into the private was no longer perceived as such and was assumed as an opportunity to exhibit and make oneself known, to achieve the so-called fifteen minutes of fame (9.8). The functioning of this form of media exhibitionism requires the emergence of a new kind of voyeurism, not necessarily sexual, which Clay Calvert, a professor of communications at the Pennsylvania State University, defined as mediated voyeurism, which refers to
the consumption of revealing images of and information about others’ apparently real and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse, through the means of the mass media and Internet.1
This new form of voyeurism—which not only wants to appreciate fame but also to encompass it—is at the root of traditional media as a threshold, a terrible place. The lack of distance between spectator and spectacle (9.1, 9.2, 9.5, 9.6) implicit in mediated voyeurism not only devalues privacy, it simultaneously alters human interaction and the capacity for discussion among individuals. “The culture of mediated voyeurism is characterized by a number of attributes,” says Calvert, “it values watching over discourse, sacrifices privacy for other’s enjoyment and enlightenment, and demands protection for often aggressive and intrusive gathering of visual images and information.”
But more importantly, mediated voyeurism separates us from the people exposed on the TV set. We are here and they are there, on the other side of the screen. They have become a new type of “other” we can observe from afar without really committing, and that yet is extremely close and accesible. An alterity whose essence does not lie simply on “not being of the home” (0.24) but in the fact of being assumed as something simultaneously distant and near, which we recognize as our own and yet constantly unsettles us. This new alterity is defined by taking place exclusively on the hyperreal threshold of the media (9.5). The “other” is not simply who we see on the screen, it is anyone who has begun to inhabit a representation that claims increasingly more territory for itself. The other is all of us.
Leave a Reply