We are Big Brother
With the coming of the mass surveilance society, Big Brother no longer needs to watch you; we all watch each other. We are Big Brother. We follow each other around on-line, on messaging services, networking sites, blogs, and forums. We videotape, photograph, and record each other at home, at work, and on the street. We text, Bluetooth, and call each other; we confuse telepresence with genuine, human interaction. We have software to track what music we listen to, what books we read, and what movies we watch so that we don’t have to take the time to get to know each other; it’s all delivered to our Inbox on an html encoded, glowing platter. We can zoom in on each other’s homes via satellite and we can scope out street corners via the internet; eavesdropping devices are routinely and unashamedly advertised on television. The omnipresent surveilance leads to internal repression; one must be careful what one says or does lest it end up on Youtube.
 The solution is two-fold: disconnecting from the electronic umbilical cord and developing an indifference to the all-present electronic eye. We must learn to cultivate the arts of conversation and body language; the well-turned phrase and the subtle gesture capture realities that our lost when digitized and scattered on the Web. We must regain an appreciation for the physical substance of a book, for the smoothness of the pages and the heft of its weight. Music must be something that is created, not consumed; we must learn to feel the vibrations of the instrument in our hands. In short, we must wake up from our electronic dreamland and return to reality. In the meantime we must not be burdened with an excess of self-consciousness. If the medium cannot deliver authenticity to our self-appointed audience, we must still be authentic in performance, in being. We must write, speak, think, create as if there were no audience. The internal repression forced upon us by the surveilance society is a reflection of the fear we have of the contents of our own souls. If we come to know ourselves and dissolve this fear, we will no longer be controlled by the threat of exposure. We will have regained a measure of autonomy in a time of subjugation.
Add comment June 18th, 2007