What’s the visual equivalent of eavesdropping?
I ask because having a definition for this as a concept will have increasing relevance as video becomes portable (yes, I know, only three more days until the iPhone [insert sound of noisemaker here] whoo, hoo…someone shoot me now) and more public. Indeed, just how am I to react to the glimpse of someone else’s pornography on portable DVD? Is looking at someone else’s downloaded episode of Battlestar Galactica the equivalent of reading over someone’s shoulder?
I have to go with no. In order to read over your shoulder I have to make a concerted effort to both take in and process the information.
But in a world where we’ve all been trained to look at the moving picture, where indeed novelists have posited a world in which the television replaces human interaction (and people walk around with ear pieces constantly piping music into their ears so they don’t have to interact with others (Ray Bradbury was a god)), am I really to blame if I catch a glimpse of what you’re watching on your 9 inch LCD screen that you’ve lugged onto the subway?
Or are we going to go with the private conversation over a cell phone in a public place school of thought: if you didn’t want me to look, you wouldn’t have played your video where I could easily see it?
Interesting questions for interesting and increasingly impersonal times.
WTF? You’re *not* camping out for a place in line to purchase The God Machine at full retail? (Either. 🙂
I know on business trips it’s hard not to pay attention to the animated display from the passenger a row ahead of me, diagonally, playing her DVDs… especially when the other visual stimuli is limited to the asshat in front of me reclining far enough back into my personal space that I can count the flecks of dandruff on his crown.
I wonder how the Japanese handle this? (From my friends’ stories, it’s not uncommon for well-groomed businessmen to be watching their favorite school-thing program on the subway.)
Another question is what happens with the added recording capability. For example, stuff like this: http://tinyurl.com/2f3dmj conveys a sense of empowerment to call bullshit on corporate malfeasance. On the other hand, what if the passenger in front of him was watching stuff he shouldn’t and, because of the length of the video, was identifiable? As you suggest, perhaps its his own fault for doing this in a public setting.
Voyeurism, I should imagine si the visual equivalent.