The Rise of the Voyeur

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Forget about television as education, writes Ziauddin Sardar, the name of the game is reality TV and it has made us all barbarians

Hellis other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. He could have added that there is no escape from other people determined to show just how hellish they really are -- on television, on the web, in the video store, on every security camera. Everywhere, they demonstrate how banal and dumbfounding they are, how unthinking and how willing to be manipulated for deplorable ends. The hell they are creating is called voyeurism. Or, if you prefer, life, the universe and everything as The Truman Show.

Voyeurism was once a minority pastime: the sad men in dirty raincoats who visited strip joints, the village "peeping Toms", the perverts gratifying their perversions. But technology has redefined voyeurism. Give a man a video camera and see his voyeuristic instincts bloom. Your most private moments could this very instant be playing on someone's VCR. if you have a penchant for exposing yourself, you can, without much bother, get on voyeurcam.com or mybedroom.com. That man in the restaurant with a new miniature camcorder could be shooting up the skirts of the waitresses. If you have made a particularly saucy video, or have a freaky tale to tell, you can always get on television. There is a burgeoning market out there. If medium is the message, then the message is voyeurism. The pandemic of voyeurism reaches its peak on television. In the US this summer, I found myself immersed in Survivor, a CBS show that is a cross between Big Brother and Castaway 2000, with survival and interpersonal duplicity presented as a game show. The episode I watched had the contestants eating squirming live grubs. When I returned home, I found the BBC's A Life of Grime which provided more insight into the repulsive nature of one's fellow citizens than is strictly desirable to maintain a civil society.

All this is in addition to the regular, overgenerous diet of freaks, deviants and sad losers one meets on imports such as Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael or Ricki as well as home-grown rubbish such as Esther and Trisha. These shows are sacrificial …