As Elvis Rolls in his Grave...

I think I just gagged, because of this. "What is this?" those of you who don't feel like clicking on the link may ask. Basically, it's Hulu's new concept, a show called, If I Can Dream. It features five vapid individuals who move into a house that has a shiteload of cameras installed into it. Then anyone can go online and watch these five people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These people are supposedly actors, musicians, etc. who will be attempting to launch a career.

They've branded it "post reality entertainment," but in reality (Did you notice that clever use of wordplay, there? Why the hell is it called "post reality," anyway? Is there a reality after reality? I digress...) it's really just a pathetic excuse for voyeurism. Hell, when I first saw the commercial for this show, I actually thought it was a joke.

But I really shouldn't be surprised this show is being made, because it seems to reflect the general direction our society has been moving in. During the 21st century, year by year, it seems to me that the individual has been steadily losing his privacy. The individuals featured on If I Can Dream are freely giving their privacy away, but recently, it seems like a torrent of encroachments on privacy have hit us in the face, without anyone actually asking for it.

There's the new Bing Map app, which is like Google Earth, except that it features a helluva lot more detail. There are certain areas you can look at as if you were walking down the street and get picture-perfect clarity. It's really cool, and I suggest that you try it out, but what does this mean for our privacy? People have always been able to watch you as you walked down the street, but they were never able to watch you from thousands of miles away. Now they can and that's kinda creepy. Even the sea isn't free from our curiousity: Google Earth now allows people to look under the water.

But is this necessarily a bad thing? It's not like Google and Bing are constantly taking pictures of the entire earth or anything. People can't watch you real-time. But the thing is, they're getting so close to that. If they can provide detailed pictures of all outdoor areas, and some indoor areas, through the Internet, isn't real-time video the next step? It's just weird.

But it's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of people would probably think of this as Orwell's "Big Brother" dystopia coming to haunt us, but I can't bring myself to see it that way. In 1984, the government was always watching you. But this is simply two private corporations providing information to anyone with Internet access. So does it matter that our privacy is being taken away?

I don't think so. Though it's a bit creepy, this technology is like all technology: it has the capacity for both good and evil. Though there's a major creeper factor in the possibility for anyone to be watching you at anytime, think of the boon to law enforcement agencies. If Bing Map got real-time video, the cops could just watch the bank robbers leave the scene of the crime, virtually follow them to their hideout, and pick up the felons there. If someone was kidnapped, it would simply be a matter of following them on video from where they were last seen to wherever they were now.

So I really don't think we should worry about these new developments. We're steadily losing our privacy: it's a fact. But it's not really a bad fact. It's just a change; people usually fear change, but this technology actually has a lot of upside to it. We can now look at the world from our desktop. No matter the potential pitfalls, that's a development to welcome.