Like Reality

Abstract

In an information economy that is built upon participatory surveillance-based entertainment, we are simultaneously acting as consumers and producers of our very own, personal mediated realities. Besides reality television formats, social networking sites such as Facebook have successfully delivered a new form of watching each other, in a seemingly safe setting, on a screen at home. But our narratives online are not only part of a global reality show, in which we perform for invisible human audiences – we are also being closely watched by the machines that meticulously record our actions and add them to their databases. We are moving in a continuous feedback loop of the surveillance-entertainment industry that we have positioned ourselves in, which constitutes our subjectivity as both performer and critic in a spectacle staged by technology.