DAZED Article by Jazz Monroe
Earlier
this week, Dazed marked the 25th anniversary of the
internet by asking whether it’s all gone a bit 1984. At this
stage, you suspect we’re way past scaremongering: as government intrusion and
corporate web tracking normalise, the reality is not so much on our doorstep as
in our lap. Now, to grasp the size of the problem, we face a necessary
question. How do we act when somebody is watching?
Essentially, it answers itself: we act. Ordinary people under
observation ‘act natural’, which is not the same as ‘being natural’. When
someone attractive meets our gaze across the street, we try to sustain that
right-foot-left motion which just seconds back was thoughtless and fluid, but
no dice. We walk peculiarly erect and trip over heels, feeling somehow naked
and alien. Of course there’s nothing frightening about this; it’s just the case
that the human gaze has a weird power, the ability to somehow reconfigure our
impulses.
Celebrities can act natural, too, but some demonstrate just how
drastically the human gaze can destabilise us. Take Kanye West: here is a man completely undressed
of social norms. Instead, his prerogative is to fulfil a cultural mythology.
Kanye waxes Biblical and rides a sexy motorbike that
signifies bravado, wealth and awesomeness. He performs the script of hip-hop
prosperity; we know and accept this. His authentic devotion to inauthentic
myths is, in a postmodern sense, absolutely central to his performance. It also
suggests just how attractive cultural archetypes become when people are
watching.
Of
course, Kanyefication is hardly an overnight process, but not all cultural
archetypes are so flamboyant. In fact, certain mythologies move towards
us. With its peculiar aspiration towards both the glamorous and mundane,
the natural and contrived, The Only Way is Essex aims
not to counter or demystify cultural mythology, but to turn
social norms into cultural mythology. Its characters elevate
everyday behaviour - sewing, weightlifting, chocolate-eating, arguing,
gossiping - to the glitzy realm of 'scripted reality',
a kind of post-reality reality. There is an art, TOWIE argues, to
regular people being regular. It means the humblebrag is the new brag,
mediocrity the new excess. But it's also part of a wider identity
crisis, shrinking our ability to differentiate between reality and
simulation.
Up to now, the vanishing division between the two has been a
problem reserved for sociologists and fiction writers. (See Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and
Don Delillo’s White
Noise.) But TOWIE smooths our
transition from being real people to being people of reality. Its characters
are not regular people, gifted or lucky enough to get famous, but nor are they
actors feigning normality. These are, instead, almost-ordinary folk carefully
chosen for their ability to 'act natural'. And they're very good at it. Indeed,
watching Lauren Pope idly curl her locks, the viewer is all but erased. Which
prompts another question: how much suggested human gaze, whether that of TV
viewers or covert government agents, must we shake off to resume natural
behaviour? Given our difficulty ignoring glances from hot strangers, you
suspect it's pretty much all of it.
“As intrusion goes pandemic, as the
internet increasingly hosts our musings and memories, we become perpetually
self-aware without even realising"
Two weeks ago, the Guardian published
Gen Z’s seminal news story: an Edward Snowden leak that
revealed GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, indiscriminately intercepted and stored
millions of Yahoo webcam images for counter-terrorism purposes.
Many of these images were sexually explicit, and the unsuspecting perpetrators
were also unsuspected. Alarming even to post-Patriot Act America,
it’s the clearest realisation to date of modern technological paranoia.
The only way to stop webcam
hacking is to cover your webcam. Check
out C-SLIDE which manufactures webcam covers for all devices (computers,
tablets, ipads, iphones, smart phones, smart tv’s, and more).
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