When I watched The Trueman Show for the first time, as a kid, it completely went over my head. I couldn’t understand it. Why would someone pay to watch another person’s life. That too 24×7. The idea seemed absurd and idiotic. I watched it again recently after almost 2 decades. My wife didn’t know that it existed. It started with us watching the Netflix special ‘The Social Dilemma’. At the end of the day the entire concept of social media is to let other people know what they are doing in their lives. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are like an audit trail of people’s lives. Or at least the events that they deemed to be important. So I was reminded of the movie which now I feel was well ahead of time.
Side-bar: May be I should sell this idea to these IT giants. Most of the celebrities are avid consumers of social media. So why not automate writing of Biographies?
When ever google photos a notification on my phone saying ‘5 Years ago today’ or ‘2 Years so today’ it scares the hell out of me. I feel like I just received a note like 👇
Anyways, my wife doesn’t like spoilers, so I did not tell her what it was about. Though we still don’t understand the joy people derive from watching/knowing about others lives, we understood that it was possible. The times we live in are where every Tom Dick and Harry television network is full of so called reality shows. So it now made sense.
May be it always did. May be having parents who did not gossip (bitch) about others made me ignorant of the trait most of us have. Curiosity. Not in Science, not in spirituality, not in seeking the purpose of life but in what our neighbors are doing. May be if everyone lived in houses made out of transparent glass, we wouldn’t need televisions anymore.
It’s not just adults, take a bunch of kids who receive presents. Everyone would be more curious about what others got. They would be restless until they know that they got something better than others or may be until they are sure no one got something better than them. Next comes education. Whenever grades are announced first we look at our grades and then ask everyone around about theirs. Strangely the only ones we retain are the ones who did better than us. I’m sure that the sadness of a low grade was always washed away on learning that our friends didn’t do any better either.
But before the Orkuts and Facebooks came along, this was it. We just frown for a day or two and you were done. But any like and comment on the posts by anyone you know will keep rubbing salt into the wounds of your failures. We forget about your life and get fixated on others.
As a kid I used to watch tons of Discovery channel. It was informational and it was educational. Well theoretically it still is. But lately its focus has been on teaching survival skills in the wild and fishing techniques. That’s reality TV too. Feels like attempts to make non fictional versions of Cast away. This is the PG rated version of reality TV if you believe eating animal shit and insects wouldn’t scar kids for life. The more popular versions of this reality based television programming are borderline voyeurism.
Truman show was truly a movie made ahead of its time. But looking at the world around me I think we are way past the concept of the show. People are volunteering to be on reality shows. A side effect of people starting valuing themselves based on the number of followers they have online or the number of likes they get. I always thought that the word Celebrity meant that a person celebrated for something they have achieved. But now it just means popular. All you have to do is let people watch you. For every video on the internet, there are 10s of videos of people filming themselves watching them.
But I still don’t understand why one would want people to follow them and watch them all day long. If Voyeurism is watching people in intimate moments, whats the word for wanting to be watched?
Random thoughts of a confused primate 