If we think about it, we all stalked a person or been intrigued with watching them without their knowing. It's that feeling you get when you played hide and seek as a child, the feeling of not being caught. You only have that feeling in those situations where you have to hide and just hope you won't get caught.
Surveillance sometimes creates positive effect and at other times negative.
Even though the majority of people do not agree with being „watched”, I must say that this is sometimes a good idea. First of all in the event of a criminal behaviour, police can discover the certain person responsible of that act, but it can not stop it from happening and it doesn’t provide the intimacy which an individual may need. Although some persons like being under surveillance, so that their every move can be recorded. For example, in my opinion, on Facebook and YouTube we attach photos and videos which allow people to loon into our lives.
But then again that is something that persons do with their own approval.
Even when you think no one is watching you, there is a probability that someone is.
In this society, we are constantly being watched and being under surveillance but it is said that this is for our own safety.
The Mobilisation of images – Comments on YouTube and Its Consequences
„Lonelygirl15” is the first YouTube star. Under this user name a teenage published short films about herself on the Internet video site, in which she chatted in from of her web cam about her lonely life for months. The blonde girl quickly acquired a huge fan base that would wait eagerly for her latest revelations. For „lonelygirl15” was not only pretty but also mysterious – and became more and more mysterious the longer she continued to stage herself in her short films. Once there was a photo of occulist Aleister Crowley on the wall behin her, which led many people to think that her family belonged to a sect. An assumption backed up by her hints that she was not allowed to leave the house and did not have any friends, which is why she was creating a social life for herself via Youtube.”
„Youtube is a sanctuary for found images, moving images, ranging somewhere between the ultimate archive and an audio-visual rubbish dump. The things you can see there : An American travels around the world and gets himself filmed doing little dances in front of such sights as Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow or the Taj Mahal in India. Two little boys singing the theme tune of the Pokemon TV series. And a never-ending stream of young men playing air guitar.Playground fights. The snow on the roads of Helsinki. The sky over Berlin. A close-up of an eye. Someone’s girlfriend who has fallen asleep in front of the television. That is the >>content<< of a few of now almost thirty million videos currently available through the YouTube website.
The principle behind Youtube is simple. Users can publish videos up to ten minutes long on the website. By means of >>viral marketing<<, in which users themselves take care of promotion through word of mouth or email, YouTube has reached a vast, global audience in no time at all. In April 2006, ore than twelve million surfers are said to have visited www.youtube.com.
So, what is there to say? That people like being watched and that they like to look in other peoples life. Maybe to compare their lives with the lives of some stragers.
„Lonelygirl15” was discovered not to be real. It was created by Miles Becker (former student of medicine and university dropout), Ramesh Flinders (screenwriter) and Greg Goodfriend (lawyer) , the three of them met at a party and cooked up their prank over a few beers.
The character named Bree was played by a New Zealand actress studying at the New York film academy.
They have created a new art form via video blogs, well that is what they thought.
There are millions of people who are letting stragers to look into their lives and get paid for it. TV shows with celebrities or even regular people. We all are desperate to look in someone else's life and criticize it.
„On the other hand, they can produce such social dynamics as that of >>lonelygirl15<<. Or they can offer a vast archive for individual tournaments amateur video or someone’s girlfriend doing a strip-tease, or all manner of film classics. All images are here now, it seems; available at all times and everywhere for consumption or further processing.”
This subject, reminds me of a movie called „The Truman Show” (1998). Truman is a man whose life is a fake one. The place he lives is in fact a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors who play their roles in the most popular TV-series in the world : The Truman Show. Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited. With the beginning of his birth, the show commenced.
Every move was being recorded, every one in his life was an actor, everything was fake. I’m sure if people would be allowed to do that in real life, they would. And I’m sure they would have a really big audience. Sometime I wonder if they are not doing this already.
Anita Witek
These are some paragraphs from an interview with Anita Witek with Barbara Clausen.
„The man Hughes, was accused and found guilty of murdering the woman next to him, Rachel, on the strength of this video surveillance footage. With the aid of these pictures which offered much scope for interpretation, the press and the prosecution succeeded in linking a specific site and a crime and thus in (re)construction a sequence of events. The visual effect of the time-code at the bottom edge of the pictures constituted a certificate of total authenticity. What interested me was that they are constructed images that stir up public opinion.”
„Above all, >>The innocent people have nothing to hide<< remains the argument that comes up in this context. The interesting thing, in contrast, is that people fail to see that even a thousand cameras will not prevent crime and just how unwavering our naive faith in media images remains.Which is why these two CCTV frames still have the potential to raise questions even seven years after they were recorded and published.”
Photos from : http://sunandtan.blogspot.com/2007/08/lonely_08.html
http://www.filmous.com/the_truman_show/
http://www.transmediale.de/optical-vacuum-artwork
http://opencity.iabr.nl/EN/open_city/_calendar/14oct_idfa_film.php
http://www.1in12.com/publications/cctv/rachel/rachel.htm
Reference : Camera Austria International
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