Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.
While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self”
Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.
While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas in 1994 about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self.” Resources like Facebook make this erosion even more pronounced.
Woodward brings up in his article about self-exploitation that there is a “need to be recorded or to record one’s self.” Exhibitionism and voyeurism have been made easy with the advances in technology and the emergence of social media websites. He calls our generation (the generation with the ability to appear before billions of people), “Warhol’s children” – “a surveillance society and a wired world of voyeurs.” I myself am guilty of looking through the mundane photos of people’s lives.
My photo series relates to our society’s need to see and be seen. I took this idea literally, taking the private and making it available to the public eye. I chose to make my photos dramatic and life-like to make the viewer feel that they are actually there, experiencing something they feel they shouldn’t. I wanted both ideas of self-exploitation and voyeurism to show through in my work, so I chose to have models reenact private events in areas easily accessible to the public.
