Reality TV & the Eyes of the World

Cars buzz along at remarkable speeds, occasionally screeching around the corner or stomping on their breaks to avoid oblivious pedestrians. An SUV parks on the curb and 5 men dressed in dark clothes emerge bobbling around in the manner of slightly drunken friends rolling from one event to another. A tall lanky man drags himself along the sidewalk with a staggered gait, half-limping in hazy diagonals across the concrete. People sit on the sidewalk while elders riding Rascal scooters roll past them. A lone bulky figure walks slowly then stops to wave across the road. A man jogs up to him and reaches for his hand with one arm, wrapping his other around him in a hug. They seem like old friends but then quickly part striding in opposite directions. Sirens echo off in the city canyons. Another grey figure stumbles along, pauses, turns and simply stares up into the sky for some interminable duration before turning around and stumbling back the way he came.

This is Adam’s Block. The little slice of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district surveilled by Adam Jackson and his two webcams. People spend hours just watching the street life, commenting below the cam views in a streaming chat window joking and speculating about the seedy and probably illegal nature of many of the transactions they witness. This is the new age of discovery masquerading as entertainment. A time where increasingly finite fragments of the human experience are being witnessed and shared shared across the species. This is humanity observing itself and peering into the every crack of life.

Adam’s Block is riding a wave of buzz after a number of high-profile TV news shows gave him national coverage. His page is registering an average visit time of 2.5 hours – an unheard of number for any web page. The simple web cam is out-competing the most zealous media outlets. Hollywood constructed the simulacrum in which dreams could be manufactured. Reality TV broke the paradigm by televising so-called real life. Such a compelling notion faltered when the scripts and directors meticulously crafting the narratives were exposed. Now, the YouTube generation is finding entertainment in the very homes and streets of the world around them. Human life, it seems, is immensely fascinating. We’re all stars in the New Reality TV.

As Hollywood flails with more and more recycled pap and the music industry guards its shareholders by never taking risks, preferring the safe profits squeezed from the next big media clone, the public hungers for authenticity and novelty. Content industries have become so conservative and profit-driven that real expression and entertainment is mostly squeezed out and marginalized. The inevitable response is the current democratization of media content that is completely redefining the broadcast industry. The viewers are taking over the network.

Life is vastly more diverse and compelling than 98% of what corporate media churns out for consumption. And this hints at the bull in the china shop of the Information Age: the best content is free content. Profit seems to erode authenticity and inevitably manages to calcify even the most creative minds. The experience of entertainment is shifting into the experience of life in all it’s detail, leaving business to hustle whatever it can from the narrowing interstices of observer & observed.

The Google paradigm is effectively partitioning content creation from many of the fiscal interests that feed on it. It’s only getting easier and easier for an individual to record, edit, publish, and share content. Adam’s Block runs on a host server, a couple of webcams, and some simple web programming. He can leave for the weekend and the feed continues to pump out quality slice-of-life entertainment while the community of viewers adds their own content and data. An incredibly simple setup is delivering one of the roughest parts of San Francisco to potentially millions of people across the globe. For ill or good, such remote voyeurism is the new media. The lo-fi street is now competing with big-budget properties of mainstream media.

Adam’s Block is only the beginning. YouTube and video is now the dominant bandwidth usage across the web. More and more free tools will arise on the mobile web platform to make it easy for anyone to share content. More cams will go online just to glimpse and capture the daily movements of humanity. The Shiba Inu puppy cam is hugely popular and viewers are hanging on every day to see the pups grow. Justin.tv is growing with hundreds of live video channels. Cameras and screens are spreading out to capture & mediate the world. CCTV channels will open and network, bringing public access to formerly-private cameras. Imagine Neighborhood Watch leveraging every open webcam in the area to reduce crime. Or local transport authorities deriving congestion patterns. Police & emergency services will increasingly use public cams to reinforce their existing information networks. Temporary wireless field cams will be deployed to capture & broadcast events, demonstrations, and invasions. Even now Qik turns a mobile phone into a live streaming video capture device. One user was recently expelled from China for streaming a Free Tibet protest to the world. The world of voyeurs is crowdsourcing the legions of self-made journalists, investigators, and sociologists. We are finding, witnessing, revealing, recording, & archiving everything that catches our eye because, really, beneath the creeping malaise of the daily grind, it’s all absolutely mind-bogglingly amazing.

Soon the video stream will separate and become transparent, revealing the rich array of data within. Video will be object-taggable and searchable. Video content will be scanned by image recognition algorithms and sent to cloud servers to identify known matches. Bots will watch streams and add their own semantic layers to the timeline, customized to serve whichever analyst or advertiser employs them. Yelp users will be revealed by their mobile GPS, identified on video by alpha channel text as they walk into the camera viewport. Increasingly network-aware vehicles and devices will communicate to cameras augmented with radio transmitters that read remote RFIDs. Clothing and accessories will be designed to communicate directly to the eyes and agents of the global panopticon, while street tech will evolve to render users invisible to the ever-present eyes of the world. And why limit to the real world? Video streams will soon provide web portals peering into virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. Information, culture, and networks are all merging around the individual, helping us better navigate our world and communicate & collaborate with our allies, while abstracting our very selves out into distributed digital networks.

Still, people stream past the staggering beggar on the sidewalk who turns to find some human moment with a woman in a wheelchair parked at curb edge. Below the cam view, the chat window scrolls ceaselessly meandering between rude humor at the expense of the homeless and casual comments among emerging clicks of remote viewers who know more about the SF Tenderloin than they do about each other. The world is getting smaller and smaller but is it getting any friendlier? What will become of the simple grace of human touch and the ionized charge of air between hands and hearts face-to-face against the deepening hypermediation of life lived through inumerable screens? How is such tech helping people and communities? Given the option, would viewers click to donate money to help lift these people out of the brutal poverty of their lives? Or do screens make everyone into hollow actors always capering solely for our amusement?