What's the point of doing anything if nobody's watching?
We
all want to be famous, to be seen, frozen, preserved in the media,
because we've come to trust what is seen more than what is actually
lived. Somehow we've gotten everything backwards and images seem more
real to us than experiences. To know that we really exist, that we
really matter, we have to see ghosts of ourselves preserved in
photographs, on television shows and videotapes, in the public eye.
And
when you go on vacation, what do you see? Scores of tourists with video
cameras screwed to their faces, as if they're trying to suck all of the
real world into the two-dimensional world of images spending their
"time off "seeing the world through a tiny glass lens. Sure, turning
everything that you could experience with all five senses into recorded
information that you can only observe from a distance, detached, offers
you the illusion of having control over your life: you can rewind and
replay them, over and over, until everything looks ridiculous. But what
kind of life is that?
What's the point of watching anything if nobody's doing?
From Days of War, Nights of Love
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