Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other…
Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives.
That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1 https://t.co/8SIkhRPTsj
This was a clear violation of personal space, for artistic effect. If you stood outside somebody’s home and peered through their windows, you’d be rightly arrested.
But today, you don’t need to. They livestream their lives continuously, for you. /2 https://t.co/Jf3CHXSSCo
A 2024 Rear Window would have the apartment owners decorating their flats with the latest fashions, while doing make up and striking poses for Stewart’s camera.
While monetising the views, with followers signing up for ongoing voyeurism. /3 https://t.co/FLqw3t3pms
This is a huge part of the personal attraction of SM, what makes it addictive. It normalises and legitimises voyeurism. An obsessive interest in others’ lives.
But voyeurism isn’t the right concept I don’t think. Because what drives that addiction is social. /4 https://t.co/E48JLsl4ge
Not individual psychology. Our interest in what others do is a process of imitative comparison, to test our status in a group. We all want to belong, to fit in. To have a recognised identity.
To know how our lives fit with others. We queue to have Jimmy photograph us. /5 https://t.co/yM6BL8FvX8
Because that gives us permission to look at his photos of everybody else as well. In a continuous and escalating game of social comparison.
These days we take the photos ourselves, and distribute them to all the other apartments in the building. /6
All while affecting outrage at violations of our privacy elsewhere. A suspected murder viewed in the pics today would start a GoFundMe campaign.
What gets attention and hopefully status is our alleged victim status. How we’ve been apparently wronged, by the collective. /7
Collective life is just a stage now, on which we perform our grievances. Covid quarantine brought every imaginable grievance out of the woodwork, delighted at the public visibility.
Without an articulated and maintained public space, we use emergencies to create them. /8
Flooding every catastrophe with our team’s specific grievance, wallowing in the visibility.
It’s why many mass shootings happen in societies that refuse the idea of a public, like the US. People want to be seen. /9
It’s why day after day here people wail into the void about why ‘we’ aren’t doing anything to fix the world’s problems. Nobody ever says who we is.
Social media is the world you get when everything is social. Paradoxically at a time when politics is all individual. /10
But that was always a lie, a banner a particular team (the libertarians) march under, to promote their own (hyper social) group.
We’re all living in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment block now. Spying on each other every day. Adjusting ourselves to what’s trending.
/end