Selling Surveillance: Privacy, Anonymity, and VTV

Abstract

Selling Surveillance: Privacy, Anonymity, and VTV David Banash Review of: Survivor andBig Brother. CBS, 2000. Andy Warhol once said that the perfect picture would be “one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous” (qtd. in Pratt 269). It seems that the invention of inexpensive web-based telecasting technologies has one-upped Warhol’s vision. A web-search for “cam” will generate thousands of hits, and one can spend hours gazing at the interiors of anonymous refrigerators, litter boxes, or corporate cubicles. If the idea behind cinéma véritéwas always to capture real life, its promise has been fulfilled on the web with thousands of cams trained on the quotidian in a continuous and mind-numbing stream of banality. It would seem that the perfect picture now is of poor resolution and of someone unfamous doing something profoundly ordinary. In a way, all this is very reminiscent of early Warhol. After all, there really are cams where you can watch someone sleep for eight hours at a stretch. The real surprise is that in this new incarnation people are actually watching. New cams are posted every day, and established cam operators receive hundreds of e-mails from obsessed viewers. There clearly is something compelling in all this. That fact, combined with the almost nonexistent cost of production, has catapulted the everyday into the center of our usually hallucinatory, star-struck culture industry. Television is now trying to capture what The Learning Channel calls “life unscripted.” In the largest and most successful gambit to capitalize on this new trend, CBS has produced Survivorand Big Brother, hybrid game shows that put contestants under constant surveillance. Timemagazine’s James Poniewozik captures the mainstream optimism associated with Survivor, Big Brother, and other reality TV programs: “there’s also a refreshing populism in the casting; here are people that you rarely see on TV: mixed-race characters; the devout; chubby gay men over 30.” Timeis only one of the major mainstream media publications to be interested in what it calls “VTV, voyeur television.” In a cover story devoted to “reality entertainment,” The New York Times Magazineobserves that “the new obsession in TV (and on the internet) is with capturing the rhythms of ordinary life—or, at least, the kinds of intimate human interactions that have previously eluded the camera’s gaze” (Sella 52). But given the focus on the banal and the ordinary that VTV supposedly values, Survivorseems an odd program in many ways. The basic premise of the series deftly mixes cynical corporate marketing and primal nostalgia. The producers have put sixteen people on an island in the South China Sea, and then split them into two eight-person teams (tribes) that have to feed and shelter themselves. Every few days, based on the outcome of various competitions, one of the groups has to vote a member off the island. The last person left on the island receives $1 million. How can such a scenario possibly provide what the producers call a glimpse of reality? Even more striking are the inversions that animate this entire concept. For American audiences, Survivorcould not be set in a more exotic location. In fact, almost none of the audience for Survivorwill have to engage in the kind of activities that define the day-to-day routines of the cast: starting fires, building shelter from raw materials, hunting for food, etc. Then there is the odd idea of shipwreck. In addition to the obligatory references to Gilligan’s Islandin almost all the reviews, there is constant talk of being marooned, the very word flashing across the screen in the title sequence. One might expect that in a shipwreck scenario the object should be to leave the island. Not here. The very object of Survivoris to stay on the island for as long as possible. These kind of inconsistencies are not minor oversights, but integral to both the production and reception of the show. The ideological functions of these odd inversions become clearer when we look at the kind of social order the producers have attempted to simulate. The cast has been organized into...