Reality TV or Surveillance?

I worked on a shoot for Microsoft where one of the gentleman we interviewed had a unique opinion about Reality TV. His outlook was different than anything I have ever really heard before. He believed that the future of reality television was closely related to that of surveillance. He described a world  where every individual was the star of their own reality television program in a sense. He used blogging as sort of the stepping stone to his theory and I found this correlation very interesting, especially now that I myself am blogging. He said the very way many of us like to blog about opinions or update our statuses with what we are doing we will do in a very different way in the near future.



Will we be watching ourselves one day?



He stated that we will begin to voice ourselves through private personal point of view videos. I found this interesting because I know Vloging or video blogs are picking up steam but I never really thought of them as a sort of "Reality TV". He said the very way blogs and personal status updates are super popular, adding videos to that mix is only going to happen by the natural progression of things. It makes a lot of sense, I could see people becoming very free in giving video updates on their twitter or Facebook just to see themselves doing something, or record web cam convo's with more frequency. I mean you can already upload videos on Facebook so whats to stop us from adding more, more frequently, inevitably becoming a video log of our daily lives as we live them. I think calling it surveillance is a bit of a stretch but who knows, some people love to see themselves on the "big screen", and with cell phones having video capability and video cameras themselves being so small I think we have already begun to enter that era. Especially with YouTube it gives us a forum to create our own brand of stardom. These videos kind of say "hey look at me" and if enough people do "look at you" who's to say where that can lead you.

To a degree I can see why he compares it to surveillance, but this is surveillance that we are doing on our own accord, recording our every move. I think that is the cool thing about social media and reality TV in general; that they will continue to combine in ways we could have never imagined, and possibly develop into something we never saw coming.