A Culture of Voyeurs

Folks on the business side of the networking industry are always asking, “what’s the next killer app?”A “killer app,” is an application or use that makes people go out and buy new technology. It’s the reason you’ve bought that same piece of music four or five times, on vinyl, then on CD, then in electronic format. It’s the reason you’ve bought that same movie four or five times, on Beta, then VHS, then DVD, now Blu-Ray. It’s the computer world equivalent of the ever changing hemline and topline in fashion. The first “killer app,” for computers was the spreadsheet. Then the word processor. Then voice over IP. Now it’s video and “convergence,” with “presence” being touted as a future killer app.

Now, let me move to an apparently unrelated question. If you walked into a coffee shop and sat down at a table with someone you’d never met, would you tell them everything you’ve put on Facebook? Why is it that girls who send nude pictures of themselves from their cell phones don’t just walk around nude in the first place? “I don’t want everyone to see,” just doesn’t seem to cut it as an excuse, does it?

The next killer app, you see, is you. Yes, you.

If you look at the list above, you’ll see that the first killer app was all about manipulating data. Yes, it was data about people, but it was pretty abstract data about people, and spreadsheets just weren’t powerful enough, in those days, to handle all the data we had at the same time. Over time, databases (effectively an alternate view of a spreadsheet, or the other way around), have become so powerful they can collect more information about you than you can remember about yourself. Who was your best friend in elementary school? You might not remember, but it’s in some computer someplace, and the computer will remember forever.

As we move through time, the data has become more personal, hasn’t it? And that’s the point. Because the killer app has always really been you. On both sides of the equation.

Because you enjoy watching people, and you enjoy being watched. Oh, I know people try and protect their privacy, but I’ll bet you find that as people spend more time on “social media,” they end up revealing more and more about themselves, as what was originally unfamiliar becomes more familiar (we are mostly afraid of that which we don’t experience), and as the desire to get attention increases.

Let me back up a bit, and rephrase the idea here, to make it more stark. The killer app is really voyeurism. The more people who expose themselves to the public eye in personal ways, the more material there is to watch, and the more people will watch. That which we feed becomes stronger, and voyeurism is no exception.

Voyeurism, through electronic means, seems to be harmless. After all, there are privacy guarantees on all these social media networks, aren’t there? And the person you’re interacting with isn’t really in your living room, or bedroom, so there’s little physical danger involved, right? And the people we’re watching, they put that information out there for us to look at, didn’t they?

But this focuses on the physical, at the expense of the spiritual. We miss the cultural implications of becoming a culture of voyeurs.

The real danger in voyeurism is in treating another human being as an object to be manipulated for our own pleasure. Once you’ve objectified a person, it’s hard to ever go back to seeing them as a real person, made in the image of God. Once you’ve started seeing the entire world through the lens of a paparazzi, it’s hard to go back to having real relationships with real people.

You are the killer app, the watcher, and the watched. A culture of voyeurs that eat bandwidth and demand new media formats to consume other people more quickly, and the fifteen second fame to entice people to allow themselves to be consumed.