LOOK AT ME!

Dick Pountain/30 January 1998/Idealog 42

We appear to be entering a new age of exhibitionism. Scanning my newspaper the other morning I learned about a new pastime - invented in the USA - which involves taking a ride on the rollercoaster at Disneyland and exposing your favourite bodily protruberances at exactly the right moment to have them captured by the closed-circuit TV cameras. (Disneyland executives are predictably not amused, presumably because they cannot charge extra for this service.) 

Then there's the example of US student Jennifer Ringley who placed a netcam in her college dorm room and so lives large portions of her life under observation from unknown web browsers. JenniCAM has attracted the interest of the mainstream media, and now in the UK someone with the unlikely name of Grumbridge is planning a TV show that similarly consists of nothing but a TV camera placed in a girl's bed-sitting room - they had no trouble in finding a drama student to accept the part.

One doesn't need a social psychology degree to analyse the root causes of this phenomenon - it's the desire to be seen on television (aka the Warhol Effect), which seems to be terribly strong among what I'm afraid I now must nowadays call the 'younger generation'. You see, I belong to the transitional generation, not quite pre-TV but not wholly of it either - television only arrived in our house when I was 10 and so missed my formative years. Just about everyone under 40 has been exposed to television from birth, and it forms part of the natural realm for them. There's even a feeling that television is somehow more real than private life, with the implication that you are not *really* real until you've appeared on it.

Nowadays I'm agnostic as to whether this is a good or a bad thing, because like everything else that concerns technology, it depends on how you use it. This was not always my view; back in the 1960's I was a devotee of the Situationists and Guy Debord's theory of the Society of the Spectacle - crudely put, this contends that the mass media conceal exploitation and power relations by mesmerising everyone with a reflection of their own lives, as performed by 'stars'. Debord was writing at a time when control of the media was entirely centralised (indeed in France TV was under state-control). The decentralising, centrifugal tendency of the Internet does not by any means undermine Debord's conclusions, but it certainly suggests some modifications. OK there are still great monopolisers of 'content' like Sony, Time-Life and the Murdoch organisation, but the web is something else altogether. Sure it's full of rubbish, but there's a quite profound sense in which it's *our* rubbish.

Last weekend I received a flying visit from my friend Rod, the Caltech prof, and as usual we spent a night drinking wine and talking technology. The talk was mostly about net bandwidth, since when not working on artificial-nose chips and the like, Rod performs consultancy for several US telecom companies, who are mad keen to counter the threat from Cable TV by providing their own broadband services to domestic phone subscribers. Last week during ComNet in Washington DC, two dozen big players including Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Rockwell and Texas Instruments signed up to a standard called DSL Lite which employs advanced modulation techniques to support 1.5 MBits/sec downloads (around 20 times better than ISDN) and 128 Kbits/sec uploads over a normal phone line. Rod was adamant that such asymmetrical DSL schemes are entirely wrong-headed - a fast downlink with a slow uplink might be OK for web browsing (after all you're only sending URL strings back up the line) but it's useless for video conferencing, where the parties at each end need equally high bandwidth.

Now I've believed for some time that videoconferencing is the killer app in waiting, though it needs both price and performance to be right before it will take off - people are just not interested in the expensive, Mickey-Mouse systems currently available. However I'd imagined videoconferencing as being good for business, where it can pay for itself in saved air fares, and for "talking to Granny in Australia". Rod then surprised me - nay, electrified me - by expressing his belief that in a few years most young people will have netcameras in their homes, just like Jenni. It's already observable that the under 30's treat mobile phones not so much as information systems but as bonding devices, just to keep in touch with their peer group. Why not take the logical next step and belong to a video peer group that literally lives in each other's pockets?

Reacting against the atomised, individualistic nature of consumer society and the traditional family, young people no longer place the same value on privacy that my generation did - this same collectivistic impulse manifestly drives the dance music culture. In short, whereas my generation associates a camera in the living room with the totalitarianism of George Orwell's Big Brother, younger folk may be sufficiently relaxed about the technology to appropriate it to their own uses. I really hope I'm right about this, though Jennifer Ringley's explanation contains a slightly chilling undertone:                                  
"...I don't feel I'm giving up my privacy. Just because people can see me doesn't mean it affects me - I'm still alone in my room, no matter what."