Crime_and_curiosity05.cda

In the poor defence of my demonic inner child, maybe using the word 'crime' is a punitive term to describe the grey area of common behaviour that I sweep under the carpet. Regrettably, one bought from an impulse buy at a young age. 

Voyeurism in the age of social media.mp3

Many would associate voyeurism with sexual gratification of watching someone getting undressed, but I'm writing about it with a non-sexual framework. Jung suggested that libido encompasses non-sexual energy that motivates people, moving on from Freud's reasoning that everything stems from sexual desire. I think the development of web 2.0 has given a lot of opportunities for people to exercise voyeuristic tendencies into browsing profiles to gain insight into the lives of others, without the effort and social risk of asking directly.   

The ethical see-saw of looking.mp3

I don't believe the passive gleaming into things people have posted publicly stems from a place of evil, but maybe from a place of curiosity and the fear of coming across too curious. This fear or another perceived barrier becomes firewood when paired with parasocial proximity and the urge to know. I think this proximity is the perceived mental or imaginary space between the self and the Other. Celebrities serve an important role that acts as a buffer to dispel some of that curiosity in a non-creepy way. One can just go down a rabbit hole of their favourite celebrity without being a creep, but this often becomes a problem when the perceived proximity is too strong, and the individual acts out. 

I drew a triangular model of what forms the passive gaze for this particular thing I'm writing about, but it sort of works with the application of the male gaze, where 'desire to know' is just 'desire'.

I grew up watching Sky (The UK&European satellite TV as blue as my website) and the big five (BBC1, 2, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 in the UK) in the 90s/00s, when female objectification was rampant*. Whether being a voyeur is creepy or not, depends on the scale of exhibitionism from the other individual. Again, I don’t mean exhibitionism on the basis of sexual gratification, but on the person’s willingness to being watched and placing themselves in a position where they are watched for some symbolic gain. 

I once stumbled on a Sky channel that was out of my depth. My absent parents didn't supervise me. It wasn't because they didn't love me. It was because they were trapped in the system, so they remained prisoners of a bigger narrative to make money.

Things like having a public profile is in the indirect contractual agreement between the exhibitionist and voyeurs - the transactional nature of voyeurs gaining information, and the exhibitionist gaining the feeling of 'being seen', validation, which might indirectly involve money from sponsors. Advertisers use the love of looking as a leverage. The exhibitionist is then put on a social pedestal (but we know that is an unstable surface with risks of devaluation and objectification).

I found this on one of my urban walks. Don't know what it is; haven't seen one in my life. A bus drove past me when I was taking a photo. 

Creepiness or wrongness is when this agreement is warped, and is felt as a weird, uncanny vibe of being watched. Is it fair to write that we feel like we’re being watched all the time in the 2020s? — I think the exhibitionists have personal responsibility to safeguard their own information, but social media, immaturity, and ‘authentic brand building’ is loosening that knowledge in keeping information private. Of course I’m biased in my loyalties with passive voyeurism, I people watch so I can analyse people and write about anthropological stuff involving social dynamics. There wouldn’t be advancement in medicine if people didn’t steal bodies from graves in the 18th and 19th centuries. We wouldn’t have the intricate knowledge of anatomy today if it weren’t for sacrilege and criminals’ desire to know. 

I'm trying to unpack that uncanny feeling of being watched into a visual model. It might relate to Deleuze and Guattrai's idea of rhizomes. In some ways it is a delusion but in some ways it is a transformative one in metacognition, which I use to trigger the motivation for writing - there’s a small kind of thrill of being watched because it is imaginary so it’s safe. It's a trick to keep on going when no one is watching. It's a bonus if there really are people watching. FOR CLARITY: this is from my point of view, and how I feel internally. If it resonates it’s by chance, I’m not a mind reader. I’ve been there before, where I was delusional and thought I was soulmates with someone.

Satellite dish the size of fry up.mp3

It reads awful, but it exists firmly British popular imagination, and I’m just bringing that information out onto text format.

* I was researching watching Sky in the 90s, and went onto an interesting rabbit hole of satellite dishes being debated as class coded, especially after Sunak's statement (it was solidified in my mind as a luxury status symbol to have, when I observed that the teachers recorded educational documentaries on their Sky to show the class - there was a running rumour in my school at the time, that the teachers were well-off, but this is confused with cultural capital - now as an adult, I have a Sky subscription, carry a Sainsbury reusable bag to grocery shop and wonder why, because my parents shopped at ASDA whilst I was growing up. I don't think my role models were my biological parents - I'm wondering that - who raised me culturally? For some reason I don't want to see it). 

Nevertheless, it makes it interesting to contemplate about, because TV in the 90s and 00s had a lot of mysogyny and male gaze, especially if you compare it with the 2020s, where it's more censored, and a lot of places are becoming gentrified with regeneration and up-pricing activities - maybe it's a symbolic carpet of some sort to hide discrimination, but I don't think this carpet was from an impulsive buy and I don't know who, or what is responsible for selling it. 

Beeple's robot dogs, 'Regular Animals' that poop out information might have an answer - in the arts: Pablo Picasso's treatment of women, and Andy Warhol and his factory vision (but don't forget, they were outputs/products of an even bigger system, I don’t think they are the big bad as Beeple portrays them as. Their mindset was formed in the milieu they grew up in, and the socio-political-cultural conditions had to be right for them to inject their ideas in it suggests that they aren’t the only ones making the conditions right). It’s incomprehensible so we look outwards. Why? Examining the title, ‘regular animals’ - an ordinary creature, indicative of you and I, it’s because it keeps us safe from ourselves.

I won't forget that time when I was studying BA Fine Art, and a boy in my cohort painted the human centipede, and a lecturer with a PhD said it was too literal.

I have a psychosomatic stomachache and traumatised after editing this. The next post is something to do with imprinting. I’ll write about role models in the next one.