This is too much. Its taking reflectivity to a level which opens a deep rent behind the facades of our society. So many things may be claimed to reflect our culture right now, but this particular invocation is raw and actually funny.
This guy just randomly goes up to people with a video camera for no apparent reason and films them. They tend to get pissed off at him. And that’s it.
Maybe this is good therapy for us. I personally used to really become upset when cameras were aimed at me in public. I’ve now come to resign myself to it and realize that it is much wiser to simply accept it and not even react to it than to get upset or agitated.
Yet this is not that easy to do. People feel like their personal space is being violated. We are arriving into a new kind of paradigm in a shocking, abrupt kind of manner. I suppose there is no completely smooth transition into it. Its just an innate, instinctive thing to react to being filmed.
I really think there is a point to what this guy is doing which goes beyond it. There is something therapeutic about it. One has to think: everything else about the lives, the personalities, the character and virtue of those filmed is not seen. All that is seen are the few seconds they are there before the camera and, for the most part, pissed off.
I absolutely don’t blame them for being pissed. I feel sorry for them and I’ve been there. But I think the camera man has a point.
In fact I really admire the relative tranquility of many of the people – even as they are getting pissed off there is still a certain part of them that is civil.
One of the morals out of this for me is: As long as there’s no serious physical violence, the people’s reactions are actually really funny.
During the moment it really seems like such an affront to have some camera filming us. But later one when we look back I think mostly our reactions seem silly.
My greatest hope is that everyone including the subjects can forgive each other and just laugh about this later and see how silly we can be.
The Zen side of it is maybe that there’s no difference between someone there with a camera or not. We should be proud of ourselves at every moment of our lives and believe that whatever we send out into the world is good always.
The paradox of this is that what this man is doing with his camera is ultimately vastly more humane and personal than all the surveillance cameras, overt and covert, which film people.
I think we see this paradox a lot now in the world. We often forget that importance of a living, breathing human in our midst. We are so surrounded and absorbed by our cold technologies that we often don’t differentiate between a living, breathing, precious being in our midst and a cold machine.
As a bicyclist I see this all the time. One of the demonic things about motor vehicles is the way they dehumanize and cut the persons in them off from everything else.
Here is more info including a more serious take with political and social overtones:
Seattle’s Creepy Cameraman Pushes Public Surveillance Buttons
‘Creepy Cameraman’ pushes limits of public surveillance — a glimpse of the future?
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