The Obsession with Watching

            We live in a society that is obsessed with watching and being watched. What is it that drives this? Today, there are many reality TV shows that people are wanting to be a part of such as the Bachelor, any of the talent shows, and even those who are looking to get their fame by being on the news giving their two cents worth of opinion to reporters. We even have movies and books based on being watched that young adults are reading and love. They are being trained to think that that’s the way life works. Also, social media plays a big role in the obsession, making everyone a reality star for their friends and followers.

            Let’s start by talking a little bit more about reality shows. I’m going to focus on The Bachelor since it is the only one that I have seen for an entire season. The show starts with 30 women who want to end up with one man. The first episode is painful to watch with the bad pick-up lines that the girls throw out, and you notice that none of the girls are your normal, average citizen. All of them are very unique and have a personality that will bring something to the show, whether it be drama, sympathy from viewers, or simply outrage. The thing with reality shows, though, is that you don’t actually see what happened second by second. Many of the conversations are staged, the women are drinking all day waiting for something to happen so they aren’t acting how they normally would in everyday life. Also, if you watched the last season you know that Corinne was the center of attention for most of the show. The directors painted her picture to be that way out of all the footage of everyone. They just as easily could have focused more on the girls that didn’t get much screen time but were better personalities, but they chose what they did for the ratings. Maybe it’s time that everyone realizes that the reality shows that we watch aren’t actually a reality at all.

            Young adults are very impressionable at their age. Many of our books and movies that have been popular in recent years have been pushing the idea that being watched is acceptable. The Maze Runner series as well as the Divergent series are both based on the idea of the characters being an experiment that outsiders are conducting. None of the characters know that they are being watched and that is very unsettling. Then, the Hunger Games series has a different take where the whole premise of the show is that the world is watching children fight to the death in an arena every year. Yes, I loved all of these series but when you stop and think about it it’s kind of messed up, especially the Hunger Games. How did a series that is about children killing each other on national TV become so popular?  It’s unsettling how these are the types of things that we are giving to our youth.

            Finally, I want to talk about social media a little bit. There are so many people that have become “famous” on different media platforms – from twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine (RIP), YouTube, and now Facebook.  Even those who don’t go viral can feel the fame in the form of likes and comments from their friends. With all of the new “live” features and stories that have taken over our social media sites, everyone is their own reality star for their friends. We are obsessed with showing the world what we are doing in our lives without really living it. The worst thing to me about this is that people aren’t enjoying the activities that they are doing because they are documenting it instead. For example, I have many friends who will go to concerts and they are only worried about recording every single second of it to put on their snapchat story. Not only is it poor quality video, but the audio is horrible. None of their friends are going to sit through 30 minutes of snapchat story, so why do they feel the need to do that? Cool, you went to a concert but do you actually remember the experience or is all you have to remember it the videos that you took on your phone? What about the atmosphere and the feelings you got? Remember any of those? Probably not because you wanted the rest of the world to know that you were having a good time. My last note on social media is that every one of us is guilty of taking pictures of things that we think are funny, things that you send your friends later. As I showed in my show and tell, now people are going even further and interacting with these people as the guy who narrated people’s lives did in the video that you can watch here: https://www.facebook.com/officialMrAwesome/videos/1217429838374096/

            We love to watch and to be watched. We count the likes on our Instagram posts, the number of retweets, etc that we get to see if people are seeing what we put out there. I wonder how much of what is done online is simply for likes.