I recognize this feeling from the movies:
Live updates of the Egyptian uprising cascade through my internet browser, and I feel that characteristic rush of the voyeur.
Much as the cinema can whet our appetite for adventure with images of shoot-outs and car chases, today I am able to track updates and view raw footage of protests in Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez without putting myself in harm’s way.
This second-hand adrenaline rush has, to some extent, been available to the viewer since the advent of TV. But the online experience offers the voyeur additional, curatorial agency.
Through the internet I can watch Al-Jazeera’s live broadcast of the turmoil in one window while I pull up shaky cell phone videos of dissidents clinging to tanks in another. Twitter rolls out short bursts of breaking news from the Egyptian protesters, Arab journalists, and American commentators on the ground. I sift through this flood of information and select the most compelling bytes. And I can’t get enough.
For me it appears as a story. “Riot police entered Al-Jazeera’s office in Cairo.” “Nighttime Curfew in #Cairo Just Went Into Effect. Protesters Not Leaving the Streets,” they tweeted on Friday.
While the story of a popular uprising to unseat a 30-year regime is compelling in its own right, the form of its dissemination today excites the viewer to a new degree. Feminist film theorists in the 1970s coined the term scopophilia, which literally means “the love or pleasure of looking,” to speak about the excitement one experiences by inhabiting a remote (and for these critics, often male) perspective while viewing a film.
All that’s to say, as a culture we enjoy peering in on events and people we do not know, and we like that we can turn off the television, click the next link, or skip to a new chapter once our attention has dissipated.
It’s a cultural preference that has amplified since the ‘70s. CNN began showing first-person cell phone videos taken last January in Iran, and this week ABC broadcast a clip shot from a hotel window in Cairo.
Is my bated news breath at all comparable to the anxiety and fear being shared on the streets of Cairo and Suez? Absolutely not – and this is why we cannot confuse the suspense that narratives play on with the passion that public protest engenders. But no matter the physical distance, we are all implicated by the media we consume and by the spectacles from which we derive pleasure, however secondhand. The participatory role that Facebook and Twitter have fulfilled by coordinating protesters is not the same role that they play in sharing footage with the rest of us.
Images should inspire action; we must not be content simply to look.
