The Spy Who Blogged Me

In one or two generations, we’ve gone from fearing Big Brother to barely noticing him. Sure, the political landscape has changed, and corporate surveillance has become part of an infrastructure that enables our preferred lifestyle of conformist individuality. But the extent to which we’ve accepted outside scrutiny into every aspect of our quotidian existence suggests that our attitude to surveillance is not simply the product of temporal shifts. Surveillance is now woven into the very fabric of our culture.

To understand how this happened, let’s go back to Orwell’s classic novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the characters are monitored via “telescreens” in every room. That was science fiction to Orwell, but today we call them televisions, and we do indeed have them, if not in every room, then in nearly every house. The difference is that we don’t fear television as the agent of an oppressive state. Rather, we embrace it. The biggest change in the social climate from 1949 to 2000 has been the rise of television. Television, unlike the ominous telescreen, didn’t turn us into people who were always being watched. First we had to become addicted to watching.

It was television that taught us to truly accept watching the lives of others as an everyday phenomenon. Some of TV’s biggest, earliest hits featured real families pretending to be fake families: 1951 gave us I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball as a wacky housewife longing for the spotlight that belonged to her bandleader husband, played by Desi Arnaz. The show featured the real-life married couple, who even managed to work their second real-life child into the series, with the televised fictional pregnancy synchronized to the actual birth of Jr.

Fast-forward to Seinfeld, and you get a show about a New York comedian named Jerry Seinfeld, played by New York comedian Jerry Seinfeld. The only successful spinoff from Seinfeld is Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show that purports to be about the real life of Larry David, the real-life producer who co-created Seinfeld. From the beginning, television audiences were asked to reconsider the separation between actor and person. Are they really that different? And if real people who play themselves are entertaining, why not just jettison the artifice of acting altogether?

Candid Camera, the long-running show hosted by the avuncular Allen Funt, did exactly that. Funt actually started out in 1947 on radio doing Candid Microphone before moving to the then barely born television industry the next year. In many ways, Candid Camera was the first incarnation of the genre we now know as reality television. It mixed predetermined elements with the unpredictable reactions of “real” people. It also, like today’s reality shows, depended heavily on the techniques of surveillance. “One of the luckiest discoveries I ever made, as far as camera concealment is concerned,” wrote Funt in his 1952 memoir, “was a small wonder known as a two-way mirror.”

In various incarnations, Candid Camera would stay on the air for fifty years. It would wind down just around the time of the reality TV explosion of 2000. A mere fifty years after Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Big Brother would go from a chilling symbol of totalitarianism to the punchline title of a reality show broadcast in various indigenous incarnations in sixty-plus countries. Big Brother and its contemporaries, like the Survivor series, continue to rely on Candid Camera’s original formula of setting up fake scenarios that nevertheless bring about “real” emotions. While Candid Camera used hidden cameras, the new reality shows, paralleling our own deepening relationship to surveillance, operate on the principle of ubiquity — so many cameras so much of the time that both participants and viewers gradually forget that they’re there at all.

Candid Camera made surveillance funny and dramatic. At the same time, scripted, fictional television was conditioning audiences to the notion that we should have ongoing access to the intimate lives of others. Today clever producers are merging the hidden-camera aesthetic of Candid Camera with the ongoing, addictive intimacy of the sitcom/soap opera. The result is a new genre of reality television sitcoms. These include, but are hardly limited to, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Hogan Knows Best, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, and House of Carters. If you haven’t seen these shows, imagine Desi as a geriatric heavy metal star, Lucy as a busty blond who thinks Chicken of the Sea is poultry, and Jr. as a bloated teenager with a personal trainer and designs on his own spinoff. Then, as now, we love to peer in on the daily doings of others. Then, as now, we’re more than willing to believe that what we’re watching isn’t really, isn’t completely, fiction. Fifty years after Desi and Lucy played themselves on television, character and actor have finally become one and the same. The bastard offspring of I Love Lucy have turned surveillance into the family (show) business.

In an age where celebrity is a lifestyle and all lifestyles are for sale, the message is clear: surveillance is something to aspire to, not fear and avoid. Furthermore, all lives are worthy of surveillance, no special talent is needed, anyone can and should apply. At a reality TV convention in Nashville, I meet Steve, a retiree from New Jersey. His favourite reality show is Big Brother. “These are people like me,” he tells me. “You think, if they can do it, I can do it.”

From loyalty programs and cctv cameras, we learn that surveillance can be convenient and even helpful. From television, we learn that surveillance is entertaining and, moreover, an accessible way to turn your life into your own product and achieve celebrity. So why not integrate the possibilities into one complete package? Welcome to the twenty-first century, where interactive surveillance fuses convenience, entertainment, and security into ongoing programs of corporate-enabled self-monitoring.

Consider the work of Justin Kan, the San Francisco entrepreneur behind Justin.tv. Following in the footsteps of such online voyeur pioneers as Steve Mann (creator of WearComp and WearCam) of Hamilton, Ontario, and Jennifer Ringley of JenniCam (the first person to offer live broadcasts from her living space twenty-four hours a day), Justin has developed a new entertainment paradigm: “lifecasting.”