Have we become a nation of viewers

We’re living in an age where our lives pretty much revolve around technology. There’s the ipod, television, radio, mobile phones, computers, video games, the list is endless. All these contraptions share the common ability to access to the internet. As well as the usual fm dial radio, you can listen to your favourite radio station online, even after the show is over. You can watch television programmes online with websites such as ‘4 On Demand’. With most phones you can access a watered down version of the internet to check those vital facebook notifications when you’re stuck on the bus. And games consoles such as the PS3, Xbox and Wii all have access to the internet so you can be playing Mario Karts with someone on the other side of the world.

Supposedly the reason for all this technology is to make life easier, and no doubt most of the time it achieves this, but is it not turning us into a nation of viewers?

Over the last few days I’ve been bed bound, nothing serious don’t worry. But spending all day everyday at home I found myself living on Facebook. Once I’d opened everything in my inbox, replied to messages on my wall, all I was doing was perusing peoples’ profiles, spying on their lives. Social Networking websites are here to help us keep in contact with our friends and family, but could they in fact be doing the opposite and taking away or abilities to uphold relationships. You go out, you have a great time, you record your crazy antics with lots of photos on your digital camera, and you post them on facebook, not forgetting to tag all you friends. Now your whole friends list has just been notified about what you got up to last night, so what’s the point in having a conversation to catch up on what you’ve been doing. You meet a new person on facebook, even though you’re only supposed to accept requests from people you actually know, we all do it. But what have you got to talk about, what’s there to find out that you don’t already know by taking a quick look at their profile?

We now have the rise of Twitter. You don’t even have to check anyone’s profile. Your timeline is refreshed every couple of minutes with “I’m at the sickest rave with A and B”, “I just ate the most amazing dinner”, “This bus smells”. You tweet your every move with 100 or so people you don’t even know following your every move. Applications such as UberTwitter even disclose your location, down to the road and possible door numbers you are at using your Blackberry’s GPRS signal to locate where you’re tweeting from.

It’s not just social networking sites that have got us watching each other, what about YouTube? It seems we are developing an obsession with exposing ourselves and having everyone watch. We are a nation of show offs. Flaunting for the cameras and becoming internet celebrities.

‘Reality TV’ is also on the rise. Everyone wants there 15minutes of fame whether it be on ‘Big Brother’ or ‘Come Dine With Me’, or Z list celebrities trying to gain new exposure on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’. Some other reality titles are: ‘The Hills, X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s/Britain’s Next Top Model, Supernanny, Wife Swap, Katie and Peter, The City, Baldwin Hills, Underage and Pregnant, World’s Strictest Parents’ How many do you watch? We are very nosey people wanting to look at everyone else’s lives. Maybe it makes us feel better to see other people less fortunate than us or maybe it motivates us to see others doing well.

Even the government is stepping up their tactics on how they can oversee everything we do. The average Londoner is caught on CCTV 300 times a day, on one of the nation’s 4.2million cameras. There are chips in our passports and even oyster card are tracking our every move. From the age of 11 to 18, your oyster card is registered to you, it knows your home address, it even knows what you look like. Now travel on London buses and trams are free for anyone holding this form of oyster card. So why when you tap on to a tram, but forget to tap out, do you receive a letter from Tfl reminding you to always tap in and out of stations? Travel is free, so there is no financial gain for the government, so what’s all the fuss about? Is it because from not tapping out they no longer have a record of where you are?

Big Brother is no longer just a program on channel 4, we are living it.