Once upon a time before the great flood of social networking, every sealed letter was opened and every closed-door conversation was eavesdropped into. When the Curtain dropped, we thought it was over.

Post-Twitter we watch the rise of the neo-voyeur. He likes watching strangers eat cheetos and play video games and his government likes watching him shop for his groceries. It is a new age of the reincarnated Big Brother.

Big Brother is a fictional character in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the enigmatic dictator of Oceania, a totalitarian state taken to its utmost logical consequence – where the ruling elite (‘the Party’) wield total power for its own sake over the inhabitants. In an Orwellian world everyone is under complete surveillance by the authorities, mainly via telescreens. People are constantly reminded of this by the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, which is the core ‘truth’ of the propaganda system in this state.

The Orwellian zeitgeist echoes in the flood of CCTV surveillance cameras in our global world over the last decade. On principles of ‘monitoring’ and ‘security’, cameras recorded everything from petty vandalism to two-year-old James Bulger being led away from the mall to his gruesome death by his murderers in the early ’90s. As civil liberty campaigners challenged the need for the governments to look out for its citizens through electronic eyes, once again very famously, CCTV camera in Columbine High School, USA captured the teen shooters during the worst school shooting massacre in history, just before they shot themselves. UK however, leads the world in surveillance. The Guardian opined on UK’s surveillance society, ‘Exactly how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK is not known, although one study four years ago estimated five million cameras had been installed. What is rarely disputed is that the UK has more cameras per citizen than anywhere else.’

In India, there are other camera-generated problems that plague us. The line between voyeurism and security started getting gray as we moved towards the 2000s – cameras flooded phones, lives and cities. One out of every 10 mobile uploads on porn sites are of ‘up-skirts’, taken by boys climbing up on an escalator shooting unaware women in skirts climbing down the opposite escalator; it’s easy, my friend showed me how. Sakshi is 30 and feels like she’s always wary of the flash: “Every time I am in a changing room, I check around to see if there are cameras around. It’s crazy how at parties, random people click your photo; I think the paranoia has inadvertently made me camera shy. We are over-exposed, if anything else.” The camera – and its video counterpart – has been an essential appendage to our modern lives. A couple of decades ago it was probably only in vogue with perverts and pedophiles, but despite the innumerable MMS scandals that have plagued Indian teens, ask the 20-somethings around and you will know that videotaping each other during a sexual act is no longer a taboo but a thrilling ride.

From hidden cameras in hotels to the ones in sting operations, one is never quite alone in this world. While corporate offices and institutions continue to ‘watch-over,’ the epidemic of the camera and its derivatives have led to ‘life-casting’ aka Jennifer Kaye Ringley’s Jenni Cam or Justin Kan’s Justin.tv which fed into our voyeur instincts and morphed into features of our popular culture way before Twitter and Facebook. In the black and white, pre-You Tube days, the camera magically transformed daily lives into public spectacle. Our neighbour’s curtains are no longer drawn, we like watching reality shows where celebrities and average people are reduced to semi-deranged test subjects. Nothing is off limits: we want to watch them 24/7 because they may not be likeable, but they are all extremely watchable, reflecting silently in the changing notion of normality. Is it normal to watch strangers living their day-to-day lives?

From homemade pornography, life-casting, MMS scandals to CCTV surveillance and hidden cameras; we live in public, in hotels, offices, roads…there is always someone watching. The horror movie is now our daily life…. Don’t forget to look over your shoulder.

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