In 1996, Jennifer Ringley, a young student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, installed a webcam in her dorm room. The camera transmitted images to a website that updated every three minutes to show the most recent image, making her one of the first online “lifecasters.” In the forty years since Rear Window something essential had changed in the concept of privacy of US culture. So much so that from the beginning Jennifer refused to filter the events that took place in front of the cameras so she sometimes appeared naked or having sex. Four years later her site jennicam.com had four million views a day.

In the FAQ of her site Ringley explained:

I don’t feel I’m giving up my privacy. Just because people see me doesn’t mean it affects me—I’m still alone in my room, no matter what. And as long as what goes on in my head is still private, I have all the space I need […] I never feel a need to hide anything going on anyway.¹

In this excerpt we see the precariousness of the concepts of individualism (as long as what goes on in my head is still private) and privacy (I have all the space I need) of contemporary US culture. As the media colonize our inner world and we enter a Ballardian phase of civilization (5.12), individuality and privacy become remnants of a bygone age that have been reduced to our heads. In fact, if one of the basic traits of individuality is the autonomy to determine the veracity of reality, a world in which reality and fiction constantly intersect is a world where individuality has become systematically impossible. In this regard, Calvert argues that “our desire to watch and the willingness of others to be watched suggest that notions of privacy are shifting and that our sense of individualism is in decline as we desire to live our lives ‘watched’ by others. Our sense of self is fulfilled by others watching our actions.”²

This loss of individuality and interiority is inseparable from the dandification of the human— from its transformation into a consumer good (2.12)—which was set in motion at the beginning of the 19th century. The human turned into Balzac’s piece of boudoir furniture (2.10, 3.2), turned into object and commodity, confers on the human the interiority of the latter; which is to say, none. Once stripped of interiority and turned into consumer images, these persons (media masks) abandon their condition of life forms to enter a deregulated market of images (3.3.2, 5.17) that makes up the econo-pneumatic substrate of media hyperreality.

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1. Quoted by Calvert in Voyeur Nation, 47. ↩︎
2. Ibíd. ↩︎