If it’s not on facebook it didn’t really happen: or, reality through technology

I watched the first episode of The Wire today.  So far it comes across as one more (exceptionally complicated) cop show.  I was struck, however, by the repeatedly interspersed shots of the action as seen through surveillance technology.  An illustrative example is when two of the cop/detective types (can’t quite keep up with the names yet) step into the elevator together.  As they enter and exit the elevator, the shot is a fairly standard medium-distance color shot–what the tv/film viewer is used to accepting as an unmediated look into the storyworld.  As the elevator ascends, however, the shot shifts to grainy black and white taken from above, as from a security camera.  Nothing whatsoever happens in the elevator–no activity, no conversation, nothing.  The only point of the shot is to remind the viewer that everyone is always being watched, that technology is constantly absorbing and fixing reality for later review and analysis.  What actually happens is ephemera; it’s what the camera captures that is reality.

This sinister reminder of the ubiquitous eye of technology is made (to me) even more disturbing in Paul Murry’s Skippy Dies. This novel seems to suggest that the mediation of reality through technology is not just an unnerving reality, but in fact the contemporary individual’s preferred method of dealing with life.  One scene that sticks in my mind is when history teacher Howard Fallon is having a strained conversation with his girlfriend, a technology writer.  He is playing with an image-enhancing digital camera about which she is writing a piece, and as he looks at her through its gold-toned screen all the tensions of their relationship fall away and he finds it easier to talk to her.  Of course, it doesn’t last–their conversation devolves into argument–but for a few moments, through the screen of the camera, he is able to see the beauty and good in the woman with whom he’s been sharing his life.

In all honesty and hopefully without sounding like an old fogey or a Luddite, I have to admit that this deeply worries me.  It worries me because I see it in myself.  I am much fonder of my online presence–aka the facebook me–than my actual self.  The allure of the online presence is control; facebook Kate is both wittier and prettier than the real thing, due to my ability to carefully think out her words and censor her images.  The thoughtless stupidisms and double chins are largely filtered out in advance, and my “about me” suggests that I spend all my time reading and painting and frolicking outdoors, passing completely over the stretches of time I spend lying on my bed staring at the ceiling or engaged in other unflattering occupations.  It’s uncomfortable to realize that one’s better half is a construct, an electronic projection of the rosier bits of oneself.  It seems wrong to prefer the image of sterilized reality filtered through the camera/internet/phone to raw, messy, uncontrolled, real reality–wrong, but uncomfortably like the truth.

Yes, I’m worried.  Of course, I could talk out the worries with an actual human being, but…I think I’ll just blog about it.