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Television became the de-facto voyeurism tool with the arrival of “reality television” like the many incarnations of Big Brother or Survivor. The seemingly random opportunity to see naked bodies is like playing a sexually driven slot machine in the privacy of your own home. You become not only addicted to the moving images, the lights emitted from the TV set becomes like a hypnotic trance pattern. Ultimately you feel comfort by having the TV on even when you’re not watching it directly.
My best friend’s wife once told me it helped her to relax after an extremely stressful day. This is not radical by any means because you stop thinking and start receiving. When the signals are coming in the form of images into the brain it placates the imagination. In the time before the box was invented people were accustomed to radio. When listening to radio your imagination was hard at work creating images of the stories shared in the spoken word.
The current evolution of this is Youtube and similar video “tube” websites. A scary trend among men has been the sharp increase in addiction to Internet pornography from 2006 onwards. This was made possible with the wide availability of broadband “always-on” Internet connections. This has become the ultimate vanity for voyeuristic experiences.
When people upload their own videos, they can either be seen by a dozen people or billion like the worldwide hit music video Gangnam Style. One of the modern legends is that Justin Bieber was “discovered” via his Youtube videos impersonating Michael Jackson. My own Youtube channel had over 60,000 views since 2007. This does make me feel rather good about myself in a vain sort of way.
Ultimately the Internet technologies have made much, much more possible because at the very root of all of this is this innate need to see and be seen. It’s not so much voyeurism as it is validation.