"innocent encounters of the voyeuristic kind"

italian philosopher antonio gramsci argued that we're socialized to behave as though there's an authority in a tower somewhere, watching us. imagine being in a prison yard. the feeling that we're being watched, keeps us in line. (i think that's from the prison notebooks.) in 'watching me watching you' (straight outta october's monde diplomatique) miyase christensen argues that we are obsessed with watching each other. with technology, our paranoia is no longer centered around some disembodied eye on high. it's us. we're the eye. we're not only ogling our neighbors. by facebook-ing, tweeting, and linking in our every move, we're offering ourselves up to be ogled in return. she says social networking satisfies--get this--'our latent desire for brother-to-brother fraternal gazing, or innocent encounters of the voyeuristic kind.'

oh my. that phrase makes me want to dry hump something. if only it were innocent. if only it were just watching. it's more like policing.

for example, last week when president obama was awarded a nobel peace prize, prominent professor melissa harris-lacewell updates her facebook status thus: 'i love my president, but he ain't no desmond tutu'. this bothered me. it's cute and pithy and in saying it, she's doing her job as a pundit: expressing her views in a soundbite-worthy... well... bite. but as a political science professor at princeton, no less, it's incredibly lazy as far as critiques go. via twitter, i asked her why she'd make that comparison. both men are black. both men have now won a nobel. that's where the comparisons end. tutu is a clergyman who never held office. makes the whole 'peace' thing a lot less complicado, no?? anyway, the good professor gave me some bullshit answer about how she met tutu, and tutu loves obama, and so that's why she made the comparison.

that's when i felt my ears heat up. seriously, did she think she was talking to a rookie? what kind of non-answer is that? how could a princeton professor be so irresponsible and what's more, inaccurate? that's like comparing gore to kissinger, which we wouldn't do. i was about to declare all out twitter war when i stopped myself.

i'm not professor harris-lacewell's friend on facebook. her comment came to me through a series of retweets. i had been eavesdropping on her 'private' conversation. does she not have a right, on her own facebook wall, when she's not in the classroom or on msnbc, to say whatever the hell she wants? or should she pay the price for the public nature of her career, and the fact that she has offered herself up to be surveilled? oh, sticky sticky stuff.

sticky enough for me to wonder what gramsci would say about all this 'watchin' you watchin' me' business. what would he have said of the death of derrion albert, broadcast on youtube? about the fact that the ever intensifying brother-to-brother gaze (not to mention video phones and handy flip cams) didn't stop four young men from beating a schoolmate to death in broad daylight?

this brings me to brice taton. the young french tourist beaten to death in belgrade only days before albert met a similar demise. outraged, serbs took to the streets on october 1st to protest the recent spate of (organized?) right wing violence towards 'liberalizing' left wing forces (read: gays and europeans. right wings are the same everywhere, ain't they?) my serb said he marched. so, bored the other day, i logged on to youtube to spy on some video of the event. i just wanted to get a feel for what it was like, how many people attended, and how somber the atmosphere.

somewhere around lennon's 'nothing to kill or die for', there he is, my serb, head and shoulders above everyone else, through some random person's lens. you can imagine me being like, 'what the hell!!' and rewinding. then rewinding again to make sure he's not hugged up on or holding hands with some random chick. of course he wasn't. of course, then i felt bad for even thinking it, and subsequently being unable to resist the urge check. but you know what? whatever, i'm human. watching, it seems, is what we do.