User:Laura Macchini/thesisDraft
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who watches the watchmen?
Laura Macchini
Thesis - final draft
Introduction
Graduation Project
“I’m already falling apart and I haven’t even started the video yet” revolves around confessional youtube videos. The videos I use deal with topics such as sexual abuse, sex change operations, cancer, drug related problems, alcoholism, eating disorders, loss of a loved one, etc. The project itself consists of a mashup of videos: a series of playlists, streaming from youtube, that will be influenced by the audience's behavior Different playlists refer to the nature of the information given by the protagonists of the videos: there is an 'introduction' level, in which people greet their audience and, for instance, state their name. Other levels refer to the kind of intimacy that would be required to discuss a certain subject in a generic relationship. The goal of my installation is to explore the patterns of confession in videoblogs, to create multiple environments for the visitor to experience those videos in different ways.
In my project I made various assumptions: this text is an attempt to address - if not all - at least some of them.
Abstract
This text is divided in two main sextions, in the first one I will employ a chronological approach to explore the source of the need to be exposed and the desire to watch - the collapse of personal privacy that is especially prominent in confessional videoblogging - through the rise of Celebrity Culture, Reality Television and Web 2.0 platforms. In the second section I will examine the consequences that the compulsion to share has had on our changing perspectives towards privacy and public space, arguing that User Generated Content is just as much a product of capitalist society than it is a necessity being exploited.
Voyeurism & Exhibitionism: interested in the lives of others
The first, and perhaps biggest assumption I made, necessary to realize my project, is the existence of a secret desire, that people have, to share personal details of our life with one another. Sharing can seem (and is) an essential component to human interaction and relationships, but its existence in the media has radically changed shape in the last century.
Clay Calvert, in his Voyeur Nation (2000), refers to our culture as one of mediated voyeurism “that values watching electronic images of other people's private and revealing moments, especially those that are sordid and sensational or simply strange and unusual".
Celebrity
Voyeuristic and Exhibitionistic tendencies, ever present in today’s reality TV shows, news, and Computer Mediated Interactions, are profoundly intertwined with the birth of the Celebrity concept. As opposed to heroes, previously idolized by various civilizations, celebrities have a very different origin, "[The hero] is a man or woman of great deeds ... The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media" [Boorstin 49,61].
In the end of the 19th century, as a result of the revolution of mass media and communications, the image of these new heroes became subject to an essential transformation. Daniel Boorstin referred to it as “Graphic Revolution”: the appearance of mechanical means of reproduction of images and ease of distribution of information.(Henderson)
In the beginning of the 20th century the press - especially the rising popularity of gossip magazines - deeply influenced the relationship between the common people and their public figures. While mass audiences were encouraged to aspire to the status of fame, “the world of celebrities was fundamentally removed from that of the audience."(McCraken, 1989;Stefanone,2010) In America, in particular, where “the pedestal belonged not to politicians and generals, but to baseball players and movie stars, gossip magazines”, it was possible to observe a rising desire to get to know celebrities. Tabloids “routinely ran feature stories about the marital infidelities, courtship, purchases and pastimes of Broadway stars."(Henderson). The public was eager to know what celebrities thought, how they lived, what kind of person they really were.
As the culture (or Cult) of Celebrity developed through the years, and as a consequence of the rise of the mass media in the first half of the 20th century, celebrities agreed to willingly start revealing details about their personal lives, in the hopes of establishing a deeper bond with their audience (Henderson). Confessional-style revelations became a fundamental element in the relationship between Celebrities and their fans: establishing a detailed image of their persona allowed them to become more approachable figures, therefore closer to their fans.
In the context of watching others’ lives unfold, Celebrities demonstrate to be pioneers in broadcasting self-disclosure: in contemporary media, confessional tendencies are a fundamental aspect of a celebrity’s relationship with his audience. The publication - in the sense of making public - of their lives allows them to foster their claim to legitimacy. By showing that they are real people, with families, children, problems just like everybody else, it allows them contrast the idea of “falsity … calculated performance” that characterizes the modern celebrity. (Newbury)
Interestingly, the attempt to support their authenticity consists in an even more attentive management of their mediated identity, in which nothing is left to chance. (Stefanone) The amendment of one’s mediated identity, and the publication of one’s personal life experiences eventually came to transcend the celebrity world with the advent of Reality Tv and Web 2.0.
Participation in Talk Shows and Reality TV Series
“truth is stranger than fiction” and therefore, possibly more entertaining.
As we’ve established in the previous chapter we indeed live in a celebrity-driven society. The fundamental appeal of Reality Television programs (and Talk Shows before them) appears evident: the chance to participate, to be in the spotlight. Exemplar is Calvert’s idea that our voyeurism may be “as simple as watching the home movies of others' lives and knowing that we could be ‘the star of the next show’”. Furthermore, in a world where fiction has become mass produced, perhaps a way to break the cycle of boredom is to get real: concentrate on the interactions between real people. The appeal of RTV is, fundamentally, the promise of the access to real people As Murray puts it, “I think the audience that watches the show thinks that they have an opportunity to be on it.””(Andrejevic); this provides grounds for better identification with the protagonists, and rids the viewer of the mawkish, predictable drama of soap operas and fictional TV shows.
As we will see, this promise is quickly overturned while examining the kind of reality offered by Reality TV.
Daytime shows : Dr.Phil, Jerry Springer and Oprah
Daytime shows in the 90s are notable precursors of self-disclosure elements comparable to those of contemporary reality TV programs. I will here concentrate on reality based shows, like The Jerry Springer Show, Dr.Phil, The Ricki Lake Show, and Oprah, as opposed to celebrity based ones (like The Ellen DeGenres Show).
Defined as Tabloid Talk shows, programs like Dr.Phil are famous for their supposed presentation of non-scripted dialogues and interactions between real people - as opposed to actors or movie stars. The Oprah Winfrey Show proved to be so unspeakably influential to motivate the creation of the neologism oprahification, defined as “the perceived increase in people's desire to discuss their emotions or personal problems, attributed to the influence of confessional television programmes” [Harper Collins Neologism Dictionary]
According to Calvert (2000), In voyeuristic tell-all talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and The Ricki Lake Show, guests customarily reveal details about their private life with the purpose of provoking and shock both the other guests and audience. PrimeTime Live and Oprah are a carnival of private oddities of ordinary people, where the peeping into the strange and unexpected become a surrogate for conversations about real problems. (Ellen Hume, Calvert) Nothing is excluded from the topics discussed: “From murder to incest, crime and punishment, almost no boundaries exist between what can and cannot be said in public” (Andersen, 1995: 160). Voyeuristic tell-all talk show test and push our expectations of privacy: since no confession is private enough to be excluded from the program, “no revelation ... or disclosure is so personal that it cannot be exposed by a talk show host. In this atmosphere of total exposure, no secrets are allowed" (Calvert)
“Confessional chat-shows, such as The Oprah Winfrey Show or The Jerry Springer Show, form a related genre that has also become increasingly popular. This confessional manner became particularly popular through programmes such as Video Diaries and Video Nation,where ‘ordinary people’ were given the technology (although not control of the editing process) to talk about their lives. Dovey suggests that we generally regard it as a ‘good thing’ to disclose personal problems to certain ‘significant’ others. Where this was once done confidentially, through an organisation such as the Samaritans, or a community religious figure, it is now increasingly done publicly on television” (Rayner 2004)
On one hand these shows allow us to dive into the sordid private details of other’s lives, on the other hand it has been often questioned whether the facts conveyed by these programs are true. There have been suspicions that the fights and arguments on the Jerry Springer Show are staged, for instance. Other shows have been criticized for sometimes letting guests distort or even entirely forge their stories.(Calvert)
Authenticity
The notion of celebrity itself, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is dominated by the idea of pretence, of a fabricated persona; similarly the protagonists of Tell-all TV Shows are necessarily permeated by the same aura of falsity, for they are just as mediated. It is only natural to doubt their statements, but at this point, in a context that Michael Newbury calls of “developed consumer capitalism”, does it still make sense to separate the real from the inauthentic?
Simply, we could consider the postmodern arguments of Baudrillard, who portrays “a brave new world in which the concept of originality, authenticity, and real-world social referentiality become irrelevant.". It would then be acceptable to interpret both celebrities and TV Shows guests, as simulacra, as “existing in an inescapable system that facilitates the pleasures of consumption.” (Newbury)
In other words,whether the experiences recounted by these guests are true or not, it does not really matter: it seems that it would speak no less about the voyeuristic / exhibitionistic tendencies of the current society. My argument is that kind of exaggerated interactions that are the central focus of Tell-all TV shows such as The Jerry Springer Show, are subject to a certain suspension of disbelief, in which the audience condones the hyperbolic nature of the stories and conflicts, for the sake of entertainment. Moreover, if someone would feel compelled, for some reason, to come up with a sensationalistic story just to appear on TV, that would serve as evidence on one hand, of the desire of becoming famous, and on the other of the need to share at every cost, that is the subject of this text. The plausibility of a particular - albeit fictitious - story, postulates the existence of similar, real stories, that the imaginary one takes as a model for copy.
Real Reality Tv and the value of honesty
"Spectatorship of other's lives [...] is increasingly paramount in our mediated, must-see TV lives. But television is not the only medium today on which our voyeuristic society preys. Evolutions in technology have introduced new, more intense, and even more intrusive an persuasive forms of voyeurism than at any time in history." (Calvert)
In the early 90s MTV premiered the hit series The Real World: seven young men and women, whose ages vary from nineteen to twentyfive were selected from more than 500 people auditioning to participate. They shared a fancy four-bedroom loft in SoHo, Manhattan for thirteen weeks, in exchange for their privacy.
Their interactions were recorded with cameras spread everywhere in the apartment, and microphones were worn by the participants, as well as placed in the rooms. Caryn James, in an article for the New York Times on the topic of The Real World, declares that "the revolving door of characters works because the series' appeal is the irresistible pull of watching lives, any lives, unfold without a script [...] Dipping in and out of other people's lives is precisely what the current television culture is all about"
“Part of the claim to “reality” of a show like The Real World” then, relies on the explicit assertion that the control of specialists over the program has given way to that of the “real” people it documents—nonspecialists, just like members of the audience” (andrejevic)
The TV networks, by broadcasting video voyeurism, are implicitly justifying to an entire generation the ways of watching others' lives unfold. (Calvert). After The Real World, in fact, many other similar reality tv shows make their appearance. In Road Rules - which also aired on MTV, and shares the same creators - six strangers are deprived of their possessions and are instructed to travel in an RV from a town to another. The idea behind it is simple: abandon them on the road with a Winnebago caravan, without food and money, and have them complete missions for rewards. The adventure, failures, conflicts and love lives of the participants of the show are constantly taped and then packaged into thirty minutes segments, ready for broadcast. (Andrejevic) As Mary-Ellis Bunim, producer of the show, admits “You can’t sustain a character that isn’t true to yourself, day and night, for thirteen weeks. It’s just not possible. It would drive you mad.” It becomes then clear that, this form of continuous surveillance is aimed to reveal authentic individuality. Josh, one of the cast members of Road Rules describes his experience in the show as “I think I got chosen … because I kind of just wear my life on my sleeve- you know what I mean? I really don’t have anything to hide from anybody, I don’t have any skeletons, and I’m a real honest kind.” Bunim herself declared that, when selecting the participants for their shows they “ try to cast people that have a natural openness” (Andrejevic)
Mark Andrejevic, on november 2001, interviewed some aspiring reality TV cast members, almost all of them agreed that the best strategy for getting picked for the show would be to be “open”,“honest”,“be themselves”. Supposedly, this was the lesson to be learned from watching the show: that honesty in cast members was not only valued but also expected. “All of the would-be cast members unsurprisingly expressed minimal reservations about being watched all the time, with many claiming that they had very little privacy in their lives, and they would eventually become accustomed to being on camera all the time.”(Andrejevic)
Programs such as The Real World and Road Rules constantly reinforce the equation between self-disclosure and honesty; interpreting their behavior as natural and authentic this allows us to see the cast not as subjects of a televised social experiment, but rather as people with whow to identify. (Andrejevic) Willing submission to surveillance serves as a demonstration, on one hand, of the strenght of one’s self image, one’s comfort level with oneself, on the other, the persistent gaze of the camera provides “a way of guaranteeing … reality” (Andrejevic) By correlating self-disclosure with the universally accepted virtue of honesty, shows like the Big Brother and Road Rules automatically predicate the opposite: resisting the eye of the camera, not accepting one’s life to be monitored (refusing to make one’s life public), means having something to hide.
“If Big Brother famously represented the threat of totalitarian government intrusion, corporations can distance themselves by making an appeal to the fact that they’re interested in providing goods and services, not in securing totalitarian domination. Furthermore, they can argue that the information they gather remains, in the legal sense, private. Otherwise, of course, they could not exploit its economic value.” (andrejevic)
In conclusion, Reality TV creates the conditions for people to behave in a certain way: it fosters the appreciation of values of honesty and openness, and the voluntary submission to the machinery of surveillance.
Post Reality TV: Imitating the professional entertainment Industry
In the early Internet era of Computer Mediated Communications (CMC), nobody knew you were a dog, or a middle aged Australian cross-dresser, for that matter. When maintaining a personal videoblog on Youtube, on the other hand, the wagging tail and the facial hair might give away your true nature. Contemporary CMC (Computer-Mediated Communications) technologies, such as video sharing platforms, or classic Social Network websites, tend to encourage to consolidate one’s online identity with the offline (real) one, rather than suggesting that their users experiment with fictional personas.
Reality TV shows suggest that the trasformation from regular people into celebrities, is very real and certainly possible. As Stefanone, Lackaff, and Rosen put it “the normative and behavioral distinction between the celebrity world and the everyday world eroded, and that the dissolution of this boundary is observable in two distinct trends: the development and explosive popularity of so-called reality television (RTV), and the concomitant adoption of Web 2.0 technologies like social networking sites (SNSs) that allow individuals to be identified by and communicate with mass-scale audiences."
"For most of their history the media were the domain of those who were, by definition, celebrities. With the wide scale adoption of media sharing, blogging, and SNSs, a much broader range of people now have the capability of creating mediated identities."
This points to the conclusion that, perhaps, "fame is just a computermounted camera away". Many celebrities periodically commit to broadcast their personal thoughts and feelings to an audience of fans; they do so through Twitter and Facebook, that - not incidentally - are the same kind of platforms used by their fans. SNS platforms allowed regular internet users to interact digitally with their idols, and, to publish their stories and confessions on blogs and videoblogs - publicly available on the web.
Furthermore, thanks to the recent technological advancements, the tools and techniques employed by celebrities (or their PR staff) to edit their mediated image, such as photo editing and “carefully coordinated social interactions, strategic selection, and entourage maintenance”, are available to the everyday SNS user, and mediate everyday personal interactions. (Stefanone, ...) Stefanone and (others)’s studies suggest that "social behaviors commonly associated with celebrities are now enacted by non-celebrities in an increasingly mediated social environment"; and also "viewers are operationalized as active processors of television content who learn and model behavior portrayed in television programming."
"Taken together, RTV and Web 2.0 set the stage for a major shift in the way individuals perceive their role in the contemporary media environment. Rather than simply being targeted by media messages they can see themselves as protagonists of mediated narratives who actively integrate themselves into a complex media ecosystem"
(andrejevic)
The exceptional transformation made possible by social media platform is, in short, of enabling non-media-professionals to partecipate in the media environment, not anymore as an audience member but as a direct multimedia producer. (Stefanone, Manovich)
"There appears to be substantial congruence between Web 2.0's culture of personal self-disclosure and the reality culture that dominates some segments of the television market. Recent research on blogging, for example, operationalizes disclosures via personal-journal style blogs as non-directed in nature (Stefanone & Jang, 2007), analogous to behavior typified by the RTV genre wherein characters engage in confessional style disclosures to view."
"One of RTV's strongest messages regards non-directed self disclosure, where personal revelations are not targeted towards specific, individual others, but rather targeted to an abstract audience. As the personal thoughts of the characters are not (yet) directly accessible to the viewing audience, the narrative structure of many RTV shows requires the characters to transgress traditional boundaries of privacy, a sacrifice they are happy to make."
We can observe an emulation of the techniques of self-disclosure made popular by celebrities and participants of RTV Shows; "the characters in RTV programming serve as models, and the Web 2.0 environment provides a new context for enacting observed behavior."
“Perhaps the secret to making surveillance more acceptable is not to lessen its extent but, on the contrary, to universalize it—or, to borrow a metaphor from the folks at MIT’s Media Lab, to make it as invisible and ubiquitous as oxygen (with the help of ever more sophisticated and unobtrusive monitoring technology).” (Andrejevic)
Confessions
“It is possible, too, that the very process of writing things down will relieve me somewhat. Today, for instance, I’m particularly oppressed by an old memory. It came back to me clearly a few days ago and, since then, it’s been like an exasperating tune that I can’t get out of my head. But I must get rid of it. I have hundreds of such memories, and from time to time, one of them detaches itself from the mass and starts tormenting me. I feel that if I write it down, I’ll get rid of it. Why not try?” Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes from underground
Guests of the Big Brother house enter the famous Red Room for their moments of confession with the producer: this image is almost impossible to avoid, when thinking of the plethora of online confessions that follow the same pattern. Sitting on an uncomfortable chair (uncomfortable to exasperate sincerity), having a “private chat” with Big Brother, and millions of viewers - undeniably the ultimate confirmation of the annihilation of boundaries between private and public space.
After examining the way Celebrity Culture silently promoted the idea of self-disclosure and people’s striving desire to become celebrities themselves - also by taking part in Tv Shows - the subject of online, public, confessions shapes itself to be the clearest example of willing submission to the machinery of surveillance: the confessant reveals details about his life even before the invasion of privacy.
Peter Brooks, in his Troubling Confessions (2001) observes as “from early in the Romantic era onward, Western literature has made the confessional mode a crucial kind of self-expression that is supposed to bear a special stamp of sincerity and authenticity”; talking about previous experiences becomes a confirmation of the truth and existence of the individual personality.
In their studies of hysteria, Freud and Breuer, describe the “talking cure”, arguing that confession is curative - hence the expression of a troubling thought can help the subject forget the trauma. (Taylor) Freud and Breuer in a second moment rethink their early notions: “within this more sophisticated notion of the psychoanalytic cure, confession is no longer seen as therapeutic in itself. In fact, confession, as a means of repeating the past, may resist catharsis, returning in a masochistic, death-driven manner to the source of psychic harm.” It eventually comes to be completely eradicated from the psychoanalitic practice altogether.
Nevertheless, Freud and Breuer’s early notions of “chimney sweeping” and the “talking cure”, or as confession as an instant pleasure and gratification, still defines the modern understanding of confession, which is invariably employed “as a justification for the publication of confessional memoirs, for public testimonials to various forms of trauma, and for confessional talk shows, among other phenomena” (Taylor)
The ritual of confession is defined by Foucault as a technology of the self, … *governmentality*
The compulsion to confession can then be examined as a vicious cycle, that Derrida, drawing from Deleuze has called a “desiring machine”. Derrida claims it functions en abîme “as one can confess even to the pleasures one took in one’s confessions, to taking pleasure in shame, and to inventing confessions in order to produce this pleasurable shame”. “Shame and guilt require confession, while confession produces more shame and guilt and pleasure in this shame and guilt, and hence the need and the desire for more confession.”
It stands to reason that the eternal Ouroboros of confession can become extremely problematic when confession takes place in public, or with a virtual interlocutor. Sherry Turkle (2011) examined the notion of broadcasting one’s thoughts and secrets, as a form of validation and avoidance of confrontation: according to her confessing to a website is often deemed therapeutic, it “can get things off your chest”: “bad feelings become less toxic when released”; this happens with the assumption that it is possible to deal with feelings without dealing direclty with another person’s reaction. (Turkle) In this sense, being seen corresponds to being acknowledged: It means that one is not insignificant or alone. Some people find gratification in this kind of public exposure, they come to see it as validation, instead of violation of their privacy. At the same time “confessing to a friend involves the possibility of disapproval, confessing to a stranger online does not require listening to their response “online confession gives you permission not to do things you should do in the real, like apologize and make amends”. (Turkle) In this context, Turkle notes “Venting feelings comes to feel like sharing them”; but when people share their thoughts and fears with an invisible audience, they still invest in that audience’s opinion. More than that, they imagine and “ideal narrative”, “they are telling their stories to people who care”. Moreover, the online setting increases the number of people that constitutes the possible audience, and to whom one applies for a caring response - for a repayment in intimacy. (Turkle)
"but confession isn't just about speaking, it's about speaking to somone - an interlocutor. Drawing on the words of Foucault, Michel Renov argues that: one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile."
the camera in most video-confession assumes the role of the Renov’s interlocutor: not knowing the identity (or the real identity) is strangely comforting, for what it matters it could anything the confessor imagines - it could even be perfect.
Part 2: Economical exploitation of the machinery of surveillance
Privacy and a new notion of public space
"The sanctity of privacy has been eroded by the increasing intrusion of the technology of surveillance" [Susan J.Ducker & Gary Gumpert]
Unsurprisingly, the discourse on privacy and sharing is linked to two complementary perspectives: voyeurism(1) and exhibitionism(2). The changing attitude towards privacy fosters voyeurism: the more we accept the fact that our lives, interest and monetary transactions are monitored and recorded, the more comfortable we feel to surrender the associated data willingly (2). (Calvert) At the same time, as our idea of private information evolves, we also are more predisposed towards watching others (1). “If I can be watched, in other words, then we certainly should be able to do some watching of our own." (Calvert)
It can be argued that one of the major social forces driving voyeurism is our change of perspective towards what kind of information should be released as public, and therefore what information deserves to be private. Accordingly, if our expectation of what is private is reduced, our expectations of receiving more information increases. “Everything becomes a game for voyeuristic viewing pleasure” (Calvert,Andrejevic)
Reality TV and Tell-all TV shows taught us that "What once were personal and private tragedies now unfold in real time and in public view with nonstop media coverage." One of the clearest example of the nonexistent boundaries between news and private grieving, is the extensive media coverage of the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999 : “cameras captured live the panic and grieving of students who witnessed death face to face … Reporters interviewed students immediately after the worst incident of violence in a high school in U.S. history” (Andrejevic)
Bente and Feist refer to this kind of manipulation of media as affect TV: the most private stories of non-prominent people” are presented “to a mass audience, crossing traditional borders of privacy and intimacy (2000, p.114)" (it’s what makes it authentic)
the I have nothing to hide argument
The argument in favour of honesty and openness - already examined in the Chapter about reality Television - is frequently paraphrased as : “I have nothing to hide, those who have something to hide should be found and punished”.
The complication with this argument arises, when those who seek to oppose it, do so by referring to things that people might want to hide (such as their naked body, or details about intimate relationships). In Solove (2011)’s opinion, in order to tackle the problem it is necessary to (...) that the information gathering problem does not lie in the disclosure of one’s (supposed) misdeeds, but in the suffocating sense of frailty and impotence created by the system’s use of personal data, the absence of knowledge, control or participation in the interpretation process. In other words: “the harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability” (Solove)
Two problems in particular that Solove (2011) calls aggregation, “ the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data” and exclusion when people “are prevented from having knowledge about how information about them is being used, and when they are barred from accessing and correcting errors in that data”. Clearly, when these conditions occur in the context of government or marketing research and databases, the possible harm is immediately comprehensible. When considering private confessions, blogs or other forms of disclosure in social media, the dangerous repercussions can be unclear.
Public Space
Fraser (1996) observed that public spaces inherently prevent certain sub-culture or minorities to participate in the public dialogue. An example of this is the absence of women from Jürgen Habermas’s archetypal public sphere: newspapers and coffee houses. "Fraser proposes that we acknowledge a range of public spheres, or counter-publics, where different groups are enabled to debate issues of common concerns. Because these counter-publics acknowledge the inevitability of differences between participants, in such spaces it is not necessary to leave your personal concerns and identities at the door."
The peculiarities, the “emotions and differences” that needed to be set aside in order to rationally discuss matters of interest, in the new public space become unique selling points: what makes us special and worthy of attention. Analogous, is the notion that “surveillance provides a certain guarantee of authenticity”, which becomes a requirement for self-expression and self-validation. (Andrejevic)
Broadcasting as Validation of Experience
“In a teeming society wherein one’s actions often go unnoticed by others, the implication is that the reality of those actions can be validated if they are recorded and broadcast—they become more real to oneself to the extent that they become real for others.”
As we have previously noted, confessions can be seen as a validation of one’s experiences: what Andrejevic refers to as “a combination of self-discovery and self-promotion, and, at times, self-discovery through self-promotion.; Reginald Withaker would describe as deliberate submission to the “participatory panopticon”.
According to Josh, a participant of the show Big Brother “Everyone should have an audience”— presumably to help them learn about themselves and to keep them honest. (Andrejevic)
Eventually, this generation came to accept as normal the presence of cameras, and ever-present surveillance. As opposed to fearing the presence of the inquiring eye of the watcher, “our desire to watch and the willingness of others to be watched suggests that notions of privacy are shifting and that our sense of individualism is in a state of decline as we desire to live our lives 'watched' by others.” “Our sense of self is fulfilled by others watching our actions." (Calvert)
As Andrejevic notes “reality TV shows … demonstrate just how gratifying being watched all the time can be. Pervasive surveillance is presented as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world— a way not just to express oneself but an entrée into the world of wealth and celebrity.”
Reaching out: a new concept of Community
‘It is a result of the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power that rules over him”
Karl Marx
Mark Andrejevic, in his Reality TV: The work of being watched, makes an brilliant parallelism: the one between the volountary submission to the “participatory panopticon” and the reallocation of the mode of labour. In his ideas, the rationalization of the mode of production - “the demarcation of the work day” and of spaces of leisure, domesticity, consumption, labour, associated with industrial capitalism - is the fundamental reason why The promise of the digital revolution has come to be so exquisitely appealing.
Nostalgia of the Tratitional Society
From the perspective of contemporary society, we could think of the Traditional society as “the locus of nonalienated handicraft production and of a rich and participatory community life” - those characteristics of modern life were easily eroded by the advent of of modern, and then mass society. (Andrejevic,Poster) In the beginning of the twentieth century - after the industrial revolution - workers were required not only to adopt a labour contract but also to convene into a distinct physical space - separated from the domestic environment - that was controlled by its owners and naturally subject to the scrutiny of surveillance. (Andrejevic) The rise of industrial capitalism, for Andrejevic meant “the disruption of the pace, space, and culture of traditional society.” Along with this came the“loss of traditional culture bearings: the emergence of a sense of anomie associated with the loss of a stable and cyclical cultural life”
Consequently, one of the recurring themes of modernity is the nostalgia of certain mores maiorum: community, tradition, “an existence steeped in the deep meaning of shared ritual”, the loss of whose Max Weber describes as “disenchantment” of the world. [ibid].
With the advent of the digital revolution comes a promise: “we may finally be reaching the point at which dramatic technological advances make it possible to recapture the era of community, of participation, of fulfilling work and individualized goods that characterized the image of traditional society figured in modernity’s backward gaze”. (Andrejevic)
The promise of the digital revolution
The first half of the twentieth century, with the increment of productivity of industrial society, was also shaped by new strategies for the rationalization of both mass consumption and mass production. The rise of mass media - supported by advertising - created then the perfect environment for a division between mental and material labour that comes, today, to characterize mass-society. (Andrejevic)
“The revolutionary promise of the digital future, on this account, is to free us from the rigid spatial and temporal boundaries associated with the rationalization of modern society : the demarcation of the work day and of spaces of leisure, domesticity, consumption, and production.”
The promise is one of convenience, flexibility, both for workers and consumers: for employees to have the possibility to customize their working conditions, in compliance of their preference, suggests a triumph over the homogeneous mass society. (Andrejevic, 29) Accordingly, the “promise of flexibility” foreshadows the “customized forms of production and consumption associated with pre-modern life, and thus caters to pre-mass-society nostalgia.”
RTV formats such as Big Brother and Survivor, by portraying the (often boring) rhythm of everyday life, contribute to predict the return to traditional premodern community of watching over each other. Also, as we have observed in the previous chapter, we desire to be watched by others. If among the attributes of modernity are the “loss of the forms of mutual monitoring associated with traditional community” along with the “emergence of distinctive anonymity of urban life”, then it is only a natural response to seek to broadcast our emotions and personal perspectives, stand out from the mass of indistinguishable individuals created by globalization; in other words to take part in the participatory panopticon.
A substitute for the traditional community
Turkle, paraphrasing sociologist David Riesman, speaks of the time when people, “without a firm inner sense of purpose … looked to their neighbors for validation.” Nowadays, constantly tethered to communication technologies, other-directedness is raised to a higher power.” The role that was previously of the physical community - the one to watch over one’s life - now belongs to the online community. Keeping our virtual peers up to date with our everyday actions gives a sense of security: there’s somebody watching out for us, if something was to happen they’d notice. Just like picking up a phone and calling a friend, interacting with an online community, particularly in the form of Online Confession and Confessional Videos, becomes a surrogate form of validation of experience:“At the moment of beginning to have a thought or feeling, we can have it validated, almost prevalidated. Exchanges may be brief, but more is not necessarily desired. The necessity is to have someone be there.” (Turkle)
Sherry Turkle (2011) refers to it as hyper-other-directedness. “Technology”, she adds, “does not cause but encourages a sensibility in which the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it, even part of the feeling itself”. She adds: “for young people (...) computers and mobile devices offer communities when families are absent.”
the Eternal Praise of User Generated Content
Interactivity … will destroy the elite divide between those who can create and those who can’t.
-Peter Gabriel, Time, 1995
Much too frequently the ciritque of mass media is associated with an acclaim of the “inherently progressive virtues of participation”; what I here call the eternal praise of user generated content, becomes evident in the equivalence of participation with democratization.(Andrejevic,Manovich)
Media, businesses, producers of consumer electronics, internet corporations and scholars all have different reasons to concur in celebrating user generated content. (Manovich) If in the twentieth century masses were merely consuming the products of entertainment industry, 21st century “pro-ams” are enthusiastically imitating it, as Manovich notes “they now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.” (Stefanone, …, Manovich)
The process of mass customization is evident in the way, since the 80s, consumer industry has tried to transform every niche and subculture into a commodity. For Manovich (2001) this happens in particular with youth subcultures: in his opinion “the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies [and] sold to them.”
“consumers are compensated for their loss of control over the production process by the compensatory promise of control and fulfillment via consumption” this “facilitates the forms of customization and niche marketing associated with the emerging online economy” (Terranova, Andrejevic)
As Andrejevic notes “interactivity allows access to a reality that one-way, centralized media could stage only as spectacle.” New Media technology allow, in fact, allow for “a convergence that dedifferentiates the spheres of consumption, production, and leisure”, the sort of interactivity that firstly, contributes to the separation of products and services, and enables surveillance - necessary to exploit the labour of volountary content production. Interactivity is therefore proposed as the resurrection of participation, as “the elimination of the differentiation between reader, writer, viewer and producer”.
“the deployment of interactive media both enacts and enables mass customization. If mass society was associated with a way of life based on concentrated surveillance in the workplace and the segmentation of the working day, flexible capitalism is associated with the generalization of surveillance and the dedifferentiation of the boundaries between production and consumption.”
The acclimatization of customers/participants to this sort of surveillance-based customization has been permitted by the change of perspective towards privacy: by eradicating the “historical association of surveillance with totalitarian forms of oppression”. If the surveillance, in other words, is advertised as a form of convenience for the consumer, a means of “adding value” to a media product, then it easily loses the association with top-down models of monitoring. (Andrejevic, Poster)
Mass customization through constant interaction with online databases promises “increased access to a wider range of material goods, and the ostensible democratization of the production process” (Andrejevic)
“The thrust of this promise is that, in radical discontinuity with the logic of mass society, customization will deliver on the equation of democratic freedom with the freedom of the market.”
The irony is that the version of digital interactivity that corresponds with commercial new media, rather than overcoming the “contradiction between free market and democratic freedom” it enacts its economic exploitation. (Andrejevic,Poster)
The labour of being watched
The promise of interactivity and participation, that Andrejevic aptly refers to as “the labor of being watched” signifies a more realistic, rewarding form of participation, for it takes place outside of the spaces of labour, outside of the system of relationship that constitute it. (Andrejevic) Examples like the VoyeurDorm website or the Big Brother house brilliantly illustrate the concept that “being watched is a form of work”. By surrendering the domestic space par exellence, the house, to the machinery of surveillance, those who participate in these initiatives turn their very lives into a “mediated spectacle”. Cast members are “working” as they carry on in their everyday routine: they are for exposing the mundane rythm of daily life - and they are being paid for it.
“dedifferentiation of work and daily life [is] enacted by reality TV itself, which transforms the rhythms of daily life into a value-generating activity by virtue of the fact that they can be monitored.”
From a marketing perspective, Andrejevic forebodes “we will be able to generate value while going about the routines of our daily lives”; in a world where we are already willingly documenting and sharing every aspect of life, we can contribute to our own surveillance with every website we visit, with every movie we watch and every purchase we make. “It’s not just that we’ll be able to work from home, in other words, but that domestic activities that didn’t used to generate value can be captured, recorded, and commodified”. Thanks to the constantly growing reach of online monitoring - and as moments of labour and leisure come to bleed into each other - domesticity becomes productive as never before.
The economical Value
It becomes clear that the dedifferentiation between spaces of labour and leisure, promoted in the name of flexibility and convenience, proves to be silently deleterious: rather than transforming the moments of work in something that looks like “free time”, on the contrary it “tends to commodify free time by transforming it into time that can be monitored, recorded, repackaged, and sold.”
“The paradox of a surveillance-based economy is that it pretends to individuals that they count—that they are worthy of individual attention—even though all it really wants to do is count them—to plug their vital statistics into a marketing algorithm.”
The fundamental economical value of user generated content lies in the users’s participation in the labour of being watched. In this context, self-disclosure, despite its banal and mundane appearance, becomes virtually priceless in a mass-customized economy. (Andrejevic)
Customer monitoring, can be literally crowdsourced - since the customers monitor themselves, in exchange for a promise of convenience and shared control; professional producers are presented with cheap content, available directly from their audience, which is invited to participate in “the work of self-disclosure” and obtains, in exchange, “less than the minimum wage”
The unavoidable question then becomes: who benefits from this process? Lev Manovich, in a recent article wonders: “To what extent the phenomenon of user-generated content is driven by consumer electronics industry – the producers of digital cameras, video cameras, music players, laptops, and so on?” And what about internet corporations, such as social media companies? After all, their business model is constructed on getting as much visitors and traffic on their websites as possible - in order to sell advertising space and usage statistics.
The technological development of the past twenty years or so saw the prices of consumer electronics drop dramatically - devices for playback and capture of media are more and more present in our daily life - internet is available virtually anywhere; this led to the explosion of user generated content available online: blogging and microblogging platforms, video-sharing websites, fora, all exist with the purpose of hosting this content. Thanks to this, as opposed to peculiar features or niche subcultures, “the details of of the everyday life of hundreds of millions of people who make and upload their media or write blog became public.”
Manovich notes that “social media platforms give users unlimited space for storage and plenty of tools to organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts, opinions, behaviour, and media to others.” And since social media corporations make money on producing services based on the data collected about their users - they might have a direct interest in having “users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible.” So it seems, that if you're not paying for it then you're the product.
Epilogue / Conclusion
This text has served the purpose of contextualizing the need to share that is behind confessional videoblogging and its audience. Without being a judgement pro or contra the phenomenon itself, it has tried to answer the fundamental questions “why do they exist in the first place?” and “who has (economic) interests in their existance?” In order to reach a complete understanding of the subject, however, a few more clarifications are in need: confessional videoblogging has been interpreted here as an example of a bigger reality - deeply interwoven and therefore inextricable from the rest of the media panorama. Boiling it down to its bare elements: confessional videoblogging comes as a consequence of the evolution of celebrity culture - of the notion that anybody can be famous, attualized by Reality TV; it is deeply connected with notions of self-disclosure, honesty and validation of experience, that are enacted and exasperated within social media. Talking to the camera, broadcasting one’s thoughts in public becomes a form - among others - through which establish connections and relationships - where the traditional, physical, community is absent. It goes without saying that these relationships (and the communities around them) are not any less real, despite being virtual. Even more so, I argue that they are necessary - for in a world in which we are, by Turkle’s own admission “alone together”, online relationships are a powerful, sometimes the only, alternative. If the promise, albeit questionable, of the digital revolution is to free us from the anonymous mass-driven modern world, to deliver us from the boundaries of space and allow us to connect with people, wherever they are - well, the promise has been kept. That said, once the roots of confessional videoblogging are uncovered, once we established which parties hold interest in its existence, and what is its importance for the communities that it creates - then it becomes almost irrelevant to ask “so is it good or bad?” Simply, it is neither: in medio stat virtus. The participation to an online, public community does correspond to the work of being watched, and it is being economically exploited. It is also a necessity, an essential component of the life of the contemporary social animal.
Bibliograhpy (incomplete)
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