Voyeur Vision Vogue
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Wildcat File Photo
Arizona Daily Wildcat
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For most people, what you watch on television is a clear indication of what kind of person you are. People who watch sports, like to play sports. People who watch soap operas, like melodramatic intrigue. People who watch wrestling, like glitzy violence, better known as Jock-Rock. But what about people who like to watch reality based television, the programs which supposedly represent reality, unfiltered and unbiased? What kind of person would ever watch these shows? We all would and do, we're trained to.
Today's television viewer has been slowly bred to be a voyeur. Viewers have been trained by television programming to fully enjoy real human oddities, real human disasters and finally really bad TV.
The downward spiral of modern television programming can be traced back to Phil Donohue, the host of the first "talk show" of the modern era. "Donohue" is also the prototype show which first began manipulating people to want more reality in television, whatever the cost to good taste.
This peaceful, academic-looking, white-haired man started what we now know as "Voyeur-Vision." Donohue's penchant for getting people talking was something new for television at the time. Also new was his way of grasping viewer attention through sometimes not-so-respected avenues.
Donohue's final sparkling moment was when he infamously appeared on-air in drag, in order to recapture the attention of his audience (who at the time had been moving to the new Oprah Show in droves). His skirted attempt to hold onto his show's viewership failed, yet his impact on television is undeniable. He hooked us hard, wanting more and more of what, until that point, we had never seen: real tears from real people who we could shut off when too annoying.
After Donohue came Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, Ricky Lake, Roseanne, Rosie, Leeza and the king of this genre, Jerry Springer. What these shows did for people then, and are still doing now, is make Voyeur-Vision vogue. People who enjoyed watching the talk-show circuit tuned in to see love, sex and domestic disputes happen live and unencumbered. There was no script, so they say, and the guests on these shows were supposedly real, like viewers everywhere. People watched in mass numbers. These talk-shows were television's first massive wave into voyeurism, and programming which now has the potential to change human temperament for the worse.
The next step in the evolving history of "Voyeur-Vision" was made by another harmless looking man, Bob Saget. Yes, Bob Saget.
The debut of Saget's show, "America's Funniest Home Videos" gave way to a whole new medium in which people can see other people's mishaps, while not having to feel badly for them.
Footage like grandma accidentally mooning everyone at her granddaughter's wedding reception to images of innumerable people falling or getting kicked in the genitals gave us all a new layer in people's lives which the talk shows did not show. The talk shows gave people a forum in which they talked about the disasters in their lives, but these same shows seldom allowed viewers to see it. Second generation "Voyeur-Vision" shows finally did.
Now, it's difficult to turn on the television without seeing a commercial for "Real TV," or "COPS," or "Busted on the Job: Caught on Tape." The transformation from watching talk shows to reality-based shows means we have reached a point in television entertainment where viewers not only enjoy seeing the emotional disaster in other people's lives, but actual physical disaster as well.
Like the gruesome ferocity of to-the-death gladiator matches enjoyed by the Roman Empire, we too have begun to enjoy the sight of real spilled blood. With shows like the "World's Deadliest Animals" and "World's Most Dangerous Police Chases" whose point is to capture death or at least human physical harm on tape, it seems we have reached new lows in the evolution of voyeuristic television. Television's evolution to this type of programming has made it possible for people to slowly accept death and violence as routine. Through what we choose to watch on television, we as viewers are transforming the previously accepted definition for brutality.
As Voyeur-Vision gains mass popularity, the effect on people's way of looking at the world is effected. People become numb to violence (nothing new to American audiences) in a different way than they once had. These shows allow people to finally say with relative ease, phrases like, "Of course I've seen someone's arm get mauled by an alligator," or "Sure I've seen someone fall out of a plane and die."
If we let it, Voyeur-Vision will change what kind of people we are, eventually altering what we think is violent and the compassion we feel for true pain. Until then, we watch mesmerized, and laugh.
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