A depravity of seeing

An off-duty police officer is accosted by an amusement park worker when a customer tips him off that he is using a well-placed digital camera to capture shots from up the dress of his toddler as she sits on her plastic scooter. On a candid photo sharing site hosted by Yahoo! one photographer details how he separates the lens from the viewfinder to allow him to look unaware and away while he captures similar shots. Sites like this and other are quickly removed and more re-emerge. A college professor relates a conversation he overhears carried on by two men inside a Barnes and Noble at Colorado mall. “They called the book stores at the mall ‘masturbation libraries’.” The expanding consumption of internet bandwidth in recent years points to the popularity of video streaming sites like Youtube where young and old, male and female prance, dance, and shake in the presence and absence of music, friends, intoxicants in hopes of reading positive comments and for a general sense of attention from web-goers and subscribers. Social networking sties like Myspace and Facebook bring people and their friend networks together, giving their blog entries a growing reader base. A student in my class checks the Facebook profile of a student who had committed suicide the night before. His current status reads, “finally happy.” A teenage girl in Alton, Missouri kills herself after her friend and mother create a fictitious cute boy who grows interested, but then breaks off contact after he hears about her recent ‘selfish’ treatment of that friend.

A list of accounts like this revolve around a few converging technologies and their media forebears. Video, the direct descendent of film expanded the access and availability of visual media, moving pictures. Its digital counterpart has expanded that access by placing the visual and editorial power of Hollywood production equipment into the hands of any consumer with the money (or credit) and interest in using a camera. The personal computer neatly marries two media, print and television, by settling on the QWERTY keyboard as the sine qua non for creating and managing a database of information and the CRT as a proper way for presenting that data in a WSISWYG visual environment benignly called a ‘desktop.’ The reasons for this are clear when we trace its history. Xerox corporation sets up the Palo Alto Research Campus (PARC) through the capital gained from leasing its copiers to the world’s businesses and organizations to create the next information environment. It marries one business-native tool, the typewriter, with a home-based interface point, the television. Media scholars point out that the television, given its native dimensions and reduced resolution, is better as an up-close medium. It captures the head and face quite well, but loses that dramatic focus by widening to the action of bodies. By tying typewriter to television, the computer—in its current software-led manifestations—truly ties visual data with text and forces an up close and personal look at the particular editorial productions that a person with a web-connected computer produces. The upshot of this marriage of typewriter and television and the imaginative horizon it casts for early adopters, users, and innovators of its networked counterpart, makes the screen a stage and publicly accessible mirror upon any activity produced through it. The imaginative horizon for networked personal computing—the one that appears for good or naught to collapse in on itself—is interactive television. The charmed loop between user and public viewer that it creates becomes a self-fulfilling medium of perverse enjoyment made all the more perverse through the buffer of distance and anonymity that one can achieve by assuming only a textual nom de plume. This relaxes the usual social proscriptions that emerge from being within bodily and visual range of one’s interlocutor and affords each a greater amount of control over the persona they choose to present before a public. A single-pane comic strip illustrates this with two dogs, one operating a computer by handling the mouse and telling its companion that “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

… or not a dog. Because often more than not the person will interact with the visual or text-based avatar with some reference to its face value. If the name is feminine the interlocutor at the other end treats the person as such. Interpersonal research calls the great amount of control and relaxed inhibitions hypersocial interaction. This greatly increases the intensity and speed of the online relationship. The two quickly move from greetings to divulging secrets as if each were afforded the cloak of a confessional booth. Yet this confessional, with all of its power-laden history in relation to the Church is lacking in the context of two relative strangers going on names, ideas, imagination, and context alone. Perhaps the superaddressee or some other pious other mediates the context for social intercourse in a way that lends some sense of authority to the between space of the interaction, its visibility, and its ultimate publicity as evidence for implicating any actions. Group communication researchers point out that GDSS technology leads to more tightly coupled groups. In my comprehensive exams defense I called this tendency among GDSS users to become meticulous curators of interaction data and in fact are overwhelmed by the content such that curatorial duties are a stop-gap measure. But the data take on a life of their own. The curatorial work becomes a fact, a task—Sisyphean at that—that consumes the psychic life and memory capacity of its users. This was the very thing the early visionaries saw as the expansive potential of a networked visual data storage technology Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider both dreamed, and in the latter, carried out business ventures in developing group presentation and decision making software. A more practical Tim Berners-Lee developed the mark-up language for distributing sharing of data and projects at CERN in Switzerland. He calls this HTML. The tool conquers a sea awash in data but conquering is a matter of firsts and seconds in choosing a tool to handle a problem. The tool exists as a fact and users quickly put it to task of handling search, retrieval, and storage tasks for an increasingly redundant, obsolete, and enormous amount of data. We curate the history of our computing.

At least some of us do. The others remain blissful in their forgetting, perhaps sometimes frustrated. Those that curate become frustrated in trying to remember the where or when of an idea in order to retrieve a file. Often the looking takes on greater significance than the drivel one typed out hastily one enlightened moment. You often remember the aura of the idea rather than the data collected attempting to capture some of that. Hence, the old proverb, you can’t capture light, makes pure and simple metaphorical sense in this case. The luminescence of a moment of insight, an epiphany, cannot be captured. The luminescence must be performed.

Performance is what most do on this new public interactive stage I call interactive television. The networked, personal computer operated by a user in the current age spends an inordinate amount of time curating data, continually retracing the metaphorical paths on the information super highway, looking for the familiar patina of interest from posters, admirers, yet ultimately from the original author, seeking comments as implicit editorial device.

The doing, the seeing, the remembering, the task of curating search terms, ideas, meta-data, dates, mnemonics form the nexus of what we call our current manifestation of networked personal computing as interactive television. What it leads to is clearly a perversity of seeing—seeing others, self, cataloging seeing, hiding in the anonymity of the seer or cavorting in the cruel editorial world of self-presentation before the anonymous, self-described expert on you and your genre.

Whether you like it or not.

The depravity emerges from both the anonymity and the distance underlying mediated computing and the tendency to associate with like-minded individuals so that each other can support and grow a community of diaper wearers, pedophiles, lovers and role-players of Japanese culture. This tendency to scan endlessly images of death, pain, wrecks, flatulence, obesity, clever edits of several frame of video feed this depravity of seeing. Images like goatse.jpg, depict a man prying open his anus with his fingers revealing a glistening raw inner space of sphincter muscle and colon wall. Videos like 2girls1cup depict two women defecating into a cup and sharing it while they kiss each other. Both become phenomena that emerge on personalized car license plates, inspire artwork, and are carefully curated via wikkis to become well-documented, searchable, and memorable internet phenomena. Everyone is watching, reading, editing, commenting, pontificating, posting and most of all they are rereading what they wrote, read, edited, commented, pontificated, posted to see who may have responded. The flame trail continues; I spend a half hour attempting to assume a profile and add to the litany of posts about a video on Youtube or on a forum where a man posts pictures of a pig hunt. I realize that I too am doing it more for the sake of the publicity of my post than for any real meeting with the original poster. Occasionally I reread what I posted to see if any have responded to my post, but I too have skipped to the last page, passing over the pages of posts that came before. Was my post redundant? How many people did the same as me and passed me up? A forum post serially depicts numerous posters’ comments, striating the posts temporally into a sedimentary layer until the post dies, becomes forgotten, becomes a broken link. The visual metaphor that the internet resurrects into a reality contributes to the contemporary cultural activity, trains its focus, and forges its memory. Endlessly useless entries are curated, helping some to remember and leaving others baffled by the labor of maintaining the internet’s recent history. The Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online repository of Internet phenomena, calls this “last Thursday” to address the real-time decay of internet history. Posts, activity, become long broadsheets that required scrolling down the screen and form the sediment of activity. A neat stack of activity assumes the patina of old news and is forgotten, cleared from the databases. A meta-community does its best to glean the best of what happened that week, and so they assume the role of journalists, capturing and commenting on the goings on during a week on a community website.

An over-reliance upon vision as a form of remembering is used in the relatively constrained activity of blogging, browsing, or commenting.