Kathlyn Hotynski

If President Kennedy was assassinated today, just imagine the YouTube footage.

Conspiracy theorists would undoubtedly have a dozen grainy camera-phone videos of the shooting to pore over, some from an angle the news cameras missed. Maybe they would have pieced together a more solid explanation. Or maybe, with the knowledge that anyone armed with a cell phone could be capturing the whole thing, such a public assassination wouldn’t have happened at all.

Over the past few years, technology and human nature have fused. Not only do we have a fascination with other people’s day-to-day lives, but almost anyone can capture them and, just as easily, broadcast them to anyone who cares to watch. No one in a public space can be sure that anything’s really “off the record.”

Why the obsession with other people’s lives in the first place? Two researchers at the University of South Carolina did a study, published in the September 2005 Journal of Consumer Research on why people watch reality television. They concluded that viewers enjoy watching real people in real situations because it creates an experience called “self-referential hyperauthenticity” – basically, we enjoy evaluating their actions and relationships based on how we think we’d react in similar situations.

Bearing that in mind, it seems to make sense that we’ve developed the technology to make everyone a potential paparazzo, to both the “real” people in our lives and the famous ones we may encounter and hope to capture in such “real” moments.

For politicians, whose every word can and will be used against them, this has even broader implications, especially during campaign season. Take former Virginia Republican senator, George Allen, who became a YouTube phenomenon after calling a volunteer for his opponent’s campaign “macaca,” a derogatory term for African immigrants, and welcoming him to America. The volunteer was actually of Indian descent and born in Virginia. On Election Day, the race between Allen and Democrat Jim Webb was so close that it remained undecided until Allen conceded three days later, making Webb the senator who tipped the 50-50 balance toward the Democrats. Could the infamous “macaca” clip have been the deathblow to the Republican majority? It’s too close to call.

More recently, YouTube offered a glimpse across international – and ethical – lines into Saddam Hussein’s execution. No American news cameras were allowed in, and Iraqi television only showed Saddam with the noose around his neck. But thanks to a bystander with a cell phone, anyone with an Internet connection and some lurid curiosity can see the former dictator fall, unhooded, through the platform to his death. More disturbing still, the end of the clip shows Saddam’s lifeless body swinging on the rope beneath the gallows. In light of the international outcry over onlookers’ conduct at his execution, broadcasting his actual death to the world certainly didn’t help matters.

You don’t have to be famous, or even on a reality show, to feel the effects of mass dissemination. Ask anyone who’s ever woken up after a night of bad decisions wondering how many times they got tagged on Facebook (not to mention the mini-feeds announcing to all their friends that the pictures were posted).

The ability to capture anyone, anywhere on film and distribute it raises issues because host sites can do little to regulate or verify the content. YouTube requires users requesting some objectionable material, including the Saddam video, to log into an account, but this does nothing to verify the viewer’s age. Myspace urges users to get permission before posting pictures of others (but, once again, there is no way to verify it). Facebook users can untag photos of themselves. All three sites forbid pornography. But ultimately, users have power that can be misused.

According to an April 3 article in The Spectator, a Facebook “friend” of one student took a picture posted of her at an underwear party, photoshopped the picture to make it look like she was naked and posted it on another site. The same student said in the article that another girl stole her MySpace photos and passed them off as herself.

As with any new technological development, the ability to make sure content doesn’t get too out of hand – or at least to monitor it – needs to advance along with it.

Ethical dilemmas, lost privacy and table-dancers aside, arming everyone with a mass audience opens an interesting window to life.

Among piles of “funny” home videos and humdrum clips lie glimpses of ingenuity. A few mega-corporations may own most of the radio and TV stations, but struggling artists now have another venue to get their work to the public.

Our need to watch other people is part of the reason we have celebrities in the first place. When the camera’s on, regular people can become famous and famous people can reveal their regular sides. The effects on entertainment – and even how we act – of our voyeuristic bent are yet to be fully felt. But along the way, we’re seeing more clearly that celebrities and politicians are, in fact, “real” people.

Hotynski is a senior print journalism and Spanish double major and online editor of The Spectator.