The Reality Reality Show
11
change to yellow exclamation marks—that is, as my TiVo starts yelling at me—
I feel the overwhelming need to watch what I have asked him to record for me.
It was freeing to miss something in the past. So I was out to dinner, the VCR
was flashing “ 12:00AM,” and I didn’t get to watch what happened on The
Colbert Report last night. It’s my loss; but learning to live with that loss made
me strong. Now, TiVo holds each episode in his cute antennaed head for me and
calls on me to watch, to make myself available at nine in the morning or three in
the afternoon or six in the evening to watch that show. It is a responsibility that
should have been over when I missed the show to begin with, a responsibility
that shouldn’t even have really felt like a responsibility, a responsibility now
made deeper by the ease with which the show is made available.
Jean Baudrillard is not quite right, then, when he claims that the “video
plugged into the TV takes over the job of watching . . . for you. Had there not
been that possibility, you would have felt obliged to watch it... .”6 It is the
addition of the technology that demands even greater obligation, the obligation
to be available later. Never mind that the TiVo takes note of everything that we
ever watch, every click that we ever make, every freezing pause that we
instigate, and then compiles this data and downloads it to the TiVo overlords
when it makes its clandestine telephone calls at night. Never mind that the
company claims that it never looks at the data individually and only uses it in
aggregate to spot trends. Our choices are all available and downloaded even
when we are not looking.7 And of course, TiVo continually observes us in order
to leam about us. He watches what we watch so that he can record things for us
that he thinks we will like. Jean Paul Sartre famously was not worried about
being looked at by a cow. He felt no power in that non-rational visual gaze.
Jacques Derrida, however, gave more thought to his cat looking at him—all the
time. What are we to say of our TiVos?
The disquieting thing about being a disvidual is that one exists for the
Other, to be used by the Other. One lives in a constructed world, a world in
which one is willing to surrender one’s basic rights and often one’s common
sense as well. This is what Zimbardo found out in his famous Stanford Prison
Experiment in which some of the volunteers where assigned to be guards and
some were assigned to be prisoners. While it is fascinating that the guards
became aggressive and violent, and the prisoners became broken and docile,
each taking on the role in which he or she was cast, the more deeply fascinating
question was why anyone continued to take part in the experiment once they
saw how terrible it was becoming. Everyone, after all, was free to leave at any
time. But having agreed to be watched and recorded and studied and analyzed
made each of the disviduals willing to forget that he or she had rights in the
external society at large. It is the same reasoning often given by reality TV stars