Big Brother’s Watching: When we become the narrative
Leyla Haidarian | 06.Aug.10
These days everyone seems to be a film-maker. We have a lot of great technology that enables us to skip film school and delve right into our first movie. I have a friend who is a dentist by profession and makes movies as a hobby. His latest flick, “Mocha Frapuchino” just premiered at a Hungarian cinema and attracted an actual crowd and a fair bit of publicity from the local media. He shot it between dental appointments and edited it at home using mostly common sense and little bit of help. Yes, it’s made for a small audience with insider references and no proper micing, but hey it’s a genre of its own!
Even for those of us who’ve taken film-making on as a focused vocation, there are more possibilities for us today than ever before. Mostly because of the available technology – which keeps getting smaller. I’ve been writing and co-producing a no-budget soap opera for Persian television/web and I can’t tell you how unimpressive our tiny high-def handycam looked atop our massive tripod, once the home of an XL 1. The end result is a polished piece of work, which is now attracting its own funding and airtime.
A film-maker’s budget has long been his or her biggest challenge (after structure). Luckily these days, you don’t even need a camera anymore. iPhones can now record high-def footage that you can cut right there on the phone and then upload to the web too. All these innovations have changed the way we consume and produce media. Many news sites transcend their traditional feeds by providing you with visual stories or mini-documentaries, some of which are authored by the readers and viewers themselves. In many ways media has become a very immediate and interactive dialogue, or "multilogue" between people all over the world, "professional" and not.
We record a clip of our dog swinging on a jungle gym in the park and three seconds later comments start flowing into our cell phones from Buneos Aires, Perth, Pretoria, Houston, Damascus, Tel Aviv and Vienna. Sometimes these interactions seem trivial, but at other times their significance becomes historic. The case of Sam Nzima’s famous photo of Hector Peterson during the riots in South Africa is re-created on a daily basis. Eye-witnesses send in footage like that of Neda Aghasoltan, the young Iranian protester whose dying seconds were captured on June 22, 2009 and circled around the world, making her the face of Iran’s "green" movement. Sitting behind my laptop I’ll learn about the fate of a villager in China whose house has just been struck by an earthquake before I learn of my kid waking up in the bedroom down the hall.
In some ways we are not only engaging in the creation of discourses and narratives, but we are becoming part of one large and converging narrative between people all over the world. On the occasion of anniversary of the elections in Iran, people in most major cities across the globe sent in videos of their locally organized actions in support of human rights in Iran. The clip my friend and I shot in Johannesburg was broadcast on BBC and Voice of America before we could even wrap our minds around its accelerating viewer numbers on YouTube.
All these clips form scenes or episodes of a story that is constantly evolving and becoming more complete as the diversity of voices involved in the process grows. We are all writing history and the picture is becoming more complete than it has ever been. That is why many countries are starting to regard internet access as a basic human right.
Of course with that much omnipresence, we can become more vulnerable. And I don’t mean the Iranian government cracking down on human rights activists who post their films on YouTube. No, I’m talking about much greater threats: A casual Twitter update that you think no-one will actually read can pop up on your mother-in-laws Google feed – along with the location you sent it from resulting in a subsequent phone call: "Hi dear, I thought you were sick in bed!"
Recoiling into my shell is often a first impulse to feeling over-exposed. Personally, there are days when I’m tempted to remove myself off Facebook and times when I leave my cell phone at home or just fall off the radar altogether. Because it’s not just the web. A cell phone can be a constant indicator of where you are too. These days instant messaging programs and other cell phone applications like The Grid enable you to share exactly where you are on the map at any given time – sometimes without your knowledge. So whether you like it or not, in some ways you’re "on air" all the time and everything you say can be "politicized". I find that a little discomforting.
But what is privacy in this age of information? If, like me, you buy into the world-view of the inherent oneness or connectivity of the human family, then privacy becomes a very relative term. Because even the most private decisions any of us make are no longer entirely a matter of each to his own, but rather a matter of collective implication. On a societal level that isn’t so hard to wrap your mind around. A nation’s energy policy, for example, naturally affects all other nations – especially if they’re the ones paying the price for it. In this age of political, economic, social and environmental interdependence our national decisions have global consequences and don’t neatly stay within our borders. We have to account for that connectivity.
But when this concept extends to an individual level, it gets a little more personal. Because while it doesn’t mean that everyone needs to know the color of your underwear, it does imply that if a loner somewhere in Nantucket decides to kill themselves, it’s not just his or her own business but everyone’s – we are after all a family (albeit a dysfunctional one). In the delicate ecosystem of life every individual is a cell, which is necessary and vital for the functioning of the whole.
This is not so much a happy-clappy but rather a bold ideological position to take, because it has massive implications that we don’t always consider. It means that we don’t only have rights, such as the right to live the way we want or the right to do with our lives what we want, but also a responsibility. This is a responsibility towards others and towards the whole – even those whose "interests" we think we don’t directly share. I think that many of us believe this and don’t believe it at the same time. We’re more or less happy to exercise some responsibility by paying taxes, by not littering, by obeying traffic laws or other laws, but we do resist being answerable to the "bigger" picture when we feel that our own personal comfort or sense of self-determination is compromised.
It’s a little schizophrenic. On the one hand we don’t want anyone else reading our personal messages on Facebook and on the other we get upset when Gordon Brown slips up as he’s getting into his car with the mic still on. Surely you caught that unfortunate moment somewhere on TV or on the web. The UK Prime Minister made a disrespectful remark about a female voter he’d just been busy speaking with while unbeknownst to him the whole world was listening. But how many of us can honestly say that we haven’t ever spoken about one of our closest family members in worse ways than Brown did about that voter? We don’t always mean it in the way that it comes out. We let off steam in private. We say things we don’t necessarily mean and we behave in ways that we don’t necessarily stand by in principle.
The trouble is, with the mic constantly on and the cameras pointing in our direction all the time, there is no place to hide and very little space to edit ourselves. We are adding to the narrative at any given time and there is always someone, somewhere who is watching and responding. Stumbling and making mistakes in the limelight is no longer a privilege of the rich and the famous. It’s a result of our heightened connectivity and it sheds a light on the gap between who we’d like to be and who we’re actually being.
So beyond the valid and sometimes prevalent dangers of credit-card fraud, identity theft or other forms of abuse, the "invasion of privacy", the availability of our info to third parties and omnipresence of the microphone or camera can be a powerful call for circumspection. It showcases and amplifies not only our strengths and achievements, but also our shortcomings - even in cruel and disproportionate ways.
If we’ve become part of a narrative then this narrative is available for others to comment on, like, or dislike, understand, misunderstand, add to and twist. With the mic being on at all times, we have an opportunity to live lives that are more conscious and cohesive with our deepest sentiments. It’s a chance to move towards more refinement as individuals and members of a human unit.
Even for those of us who’ve taken film-making on as a focused vocation, there are more possibilities for us today than ever before. Mostly because of the available technology – which keeps getting smaller. I’ve been writing and co-producing a no-budget soap opera for Persian television/web and I can’t tell you how unimpressive our tiny high-def handycam looked atop our massive tripod, once the home of an XL 1. The end result is a polished piece of work, which is now attracting its own funding and airtime.
A film-maker’s budget has long been his or her biggest challenge (after structure). Luckily these days, you don’t even need a camera anymore. iPhones can now record high-def footage that you can cut right there on the phone and then upload to the web too. All these innovations have changed the way we consume and produce media. Many news sites transcend their traditional feeds by providing you with visual stories or mini-documentaries, some of which are authored by the readers and viewers themselves. In many ways media has become a very immediate and interactive dialogue, or "multilogue" between people all over the world, "professional" and not.
We record a clip of our dog swinging on a jungle gym in the park and three seconds later comments start flowing into our cell phones from Buneos Aires, Perth, Pretoria, Houston, Damascus, Tel Aviv and Vienna. Sometimes these interactions seem trivial, but at other times their significance becomes historic. The case of Sam Nzima’s famous photo of Hector Peterson during the riots in South Africa is re-created on a daily basis. Eye-witnesses send in footage like that of Neda Aghasoltan, the young Iranian protester whose dying seconds were captured on June 22, 2009 and circled around the world, making her the face of Iran’s "green" movement. Sitting behind my laptop I’ll learn about the fate of a villager in China whose house has just been struck by an earthquake before I learn of my kid waking up in the bedroom down the hall.
In some ways we are not only engaging in the creation of discourses and narratives, but we are becoming part of one large and converging narrative between people all over the world. On the occasion of anniversary of the elections in Iran, people in most major cities across the globe sent in videos of their locally organized actions in support of human rights in Iran. The clip my friend and I shot in Johannesburg was broadcast on BBC and Voice of America before we could even wrap our minds around its accelerating viewer numbers on YouTube.
All these clips form scenes or episodes of a story that is constantly evolving and becoming more complete as the diversity of voices involved in the process grows. We are all writing history and the picture is becoming more complete than it has ever been. That is why many countries are starting to regard internet access as a basic human right.
Of course with that much omnipresence, we can become more vulnerable. And I don’t mean the Iranian government cracking down on human rights activists who post their films on YouTube. No, I’m talking about much greater threats: A casual Twitter update that you think no-one will actually read can pop up on your mother-in-laws Google feed – along with the location you sent it from resulting in a subsequent phone call: "Hi dear, I thought you were sick in bed!"
Recoiling into my shell is often a first impulse to feeling over-exposed. Personally, there are days when I’m tempted to remove myself off Facebook and times when I leave my cell phone at home or just fall off the radar altogether. Because it’s not just the web. A cell phone can be a constant indicator of where you are too. These days instant messaging programs and other cell phone applications like The Grid enable you to share exactly where you are on the map at any given time – sometimes without your knowledge. So whether you like it or not, in some ways you’re "on air" all the time and everything you say can be "politicized". I find that a little discomforting.
But what is privacy in this age of information? If, like me, you buy into the world-view of the inherent oneness or connectivity of the human family, then privacy becomes a very relative term. Because even the most private decisions any of us make are no longer entirely a matter of each to his own, but rather a matter of collective implication. On a societal level that isn’t so hard to wrap your mind around. A nation’s energy policy, for example, naturally affects all other nations – especially if they’re the ones paying the price for it. In this age of political, economic, social and environmental interdependence our national decisions have global consequences and don’t neatly stay within our borders. We have to account for that connectivity.
But when this concept extends to an individual level, it gets a little more personal. Because while it doesn’t mean that everyone needs to know the color of your underwear, it does imply that if a loner somewhere in Nantucket decides to kill themselves, it’s not just his or her own business but everyone’s – we are after all a family (albeit a dysfunctional one). In the delicate ecosystem of life every individual is a cell, which is necessary and vital for the functioning of the whole.
This is not so much a happy-clappy but rather a bold ideological position to take, because it has massive implications that we don’t always consider. It means that we don’t only have rights, such as the right to live the way we want or the right to do with our lives what we want, but also a responsibility. This is a responsibility towards others and towards the whole – even those whose "interests" we think we don’t directly share. I think that many of us believe this and don’t believe it at the same time. We’re more or less happy to exercise some responsibility by paying taxes, by not littering, by obeying traffic laws or other laws, but we do resist being answerable to the "bigger" picture when we feel that our own personal comfort or sense of self-determination is compromised.
It’s a little schizophrenic. On the one hand we don’t want anyone else reading our personal messages on Facebook and on the other we get upset when Gordon Brown slips up as he’s getting into his car with the mic still on. Surely you caught that unfortunate moment somewhere on TV or on the web. The UK Prime Minister made a disrespectful remark about a female voter he’d just been busy speaking with while unbeknownst to him the whole world was listening. But how many of us can honestly say that we haven’t ever spoken about one of our closest family members in worse ways than Brown did about that voter? We don’t always mean it in the way that it comes out. We let off steam in private. We say things we don’t necessarily mean and we behave in ways that we don’t necessarily stand by in principle.
The trouble is, with the mic constantly on and the cameras pointing in our direction all the time, there is no place to hide and very little space to edit ourselves. We are adding to the narrative at any given time and there is always someone, somewhere who is watching and responding. Stumbling and making mistakes in the limelight is no longer a privilege of the rich and the famous. It’s a result of our heightened connectivity and it sheds a light on the gap between who we’d like to be and who we’re actually being.
So beyond the valid and sometimes prevalent dangers of credit-card fraud, identity theft or other forms of abuse, the "invasion of privacy", the availability of our info to third parties and omnipresence of the microphone or camera can be a powerful call for circumspection. It showcases and amplifies not only our strengths and achievements, but also our shortcomings - even in cruel and disproportionate ways.
If we’ve become part of a narrative then this narrative is available for others to comment on, like, or dislike, understand, misunderstand, add to and twist. With the mic being on at all times, we have an opportunity to live lives that are more conscious and cohesive with our deepest sentiments. It’s a chance to move towards more refinement as individuals and members of a human unit.
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1. Posted on 26.Aug.10 From: daleepsud
I fully agree on one point about the opportunities that we have today but as a film maker myself i sometime feel the actual design and format of films where we tell a story by creating visual will not die. The cinema has the ability and patience to live,giving people like us a platform to express our self. The exposure of humans through net and technology may have given scope to many yet it still is only an extension of personal feelings ,missing a large canvass where we address the audience.It is like a holiday photograph ,creating an illusion that this is truth but we know it is only a moment of truth.
daleep sud