when the imaginary audience isn't imaginary

when did it become normal to film strangers, and what's the real danger? who really owns your image? (spoiler: it's not you)

The word panopticon might be losing its meaning a little through overuse, but that doesn’t make it less applicable. We’re all feeling more observed and doing more watching than ever before. Beyond the social media slew of editing, product pushing, and criticism, there’s a reality we have to acknowledge: we’ve lived in an artificial space for a long time now. We’re not just shapeshifting any more, we’re undergoing a transition of symbolism, of what the visual means to us. We are our images.

It feels increasingly as though our bodies are avatars we walk around in so that the true self, the online visual, can be enhanced. So many of the ways we enjoy ourselves, look after ourselves, and find our places in the world, are not only captured, but tailored and tweaked so that when we do capture them, they’re as palatable as possible. I’m aware that I might have been part of the last generation to remember when the internet was something you visited or picked up and put down like a toy; a lens through which to see the world, rather than the whole world itself. Your brain is barely solid, and you’re teaching yourself, symbolically, that the pixels on your screen arranged to look like your friends are your friends- that’s where they live. At such a young age, how can you conceive of a bigger world around yourself? Before you’ve had a decade on the planet, how can you understand what you’re getting yourself into? Barely in the throes of childhood, you moved your life, your relationships, your passions- your identity- online. It’s nigh-on impossible to extricate yourself from that system. In a Lacanian sense, we can never go back to before the symbolic; we’ve constructed our selfhood on foundations of the external.

Increasingly, we don’t get to choose whether or not we’re turned into an image in the first place, not just what happens to it once it exists. The culture of filming strangers in public, interviewing them, shaming them, celebrating them, is more pervasive than ever. What is it about the way we’re so online that makes us think the people around us are content waiting to be digitized? I can’t emphasise enough how bizarre this concept is outside of the internet bubble- if there can even be an outside, anymore.. 

During my undergraduate degree, I studied in a city plagued by a ‘What are you listening to?’ TikToker. He’d stop strangers in the street and ask them what music was playing in their earphones- a theoretically lovely way to break down the barriers we’ve created in otherwise shared spaces, right? I lived in fear of him. I’d had conversations with others where we confessed that walking down certain streets where he commonly operated, we had songs queued up, or lies ready to tell, to make sure we’d have the right kind of image if he appeared. We analysed what would be the ideal song to name. The verdict: not something ironically good, not something mainstream indie that makes you seem like you’re trying too hard, not a song you think is just for you but actually has 5 million listens, not something Top 40 popular, but maybe something popular enough that you seem above nonchalance, maybe something obscure and mysterious. So nothing, really. There’s no answer that can help you escape from the mortification of being caught off guard. 

Others weren’t so lucky. People stumbling over their words as they checked their phone to find the name of a song, making it look like they didn’t know it. People who didn’t seem to clock that they were being filmed. People at the end of a long week, confusion in their eyes. The worst of the lot: a woman who didn’t answer, but instead said what we all want to respond to strangers with at times: “Please, I’m having such a bad day, I don’t want to. Can you leave me alone?”. She was posted anyway. All content is good content. At one point, one such video was posted that gave me and my friends at least ten minutes of excitement: a guy I was in a lighthearted flirtation with was in the background. Get the news crews in, alert the papers! Look at the way he’s leaning against that doorframe! Check the comments! OMG, stop zooming in!! It was a thrill of highschool proportions- a part of your world being captured for wider viewing, made real through a camera, and a chance to gossip and giggle. But I was already chatting to him most days- the interest in seeing him in pixel form was unsurprisingly short-lived. As is the case for the most part: there’s a temporary elation at being visible, being chosen, and at some point this wears off. Then what’s left? 

The comment sections of these videos can be positive- complimenting peoples’ style and music taste (the true, pure use of the internet: creating our identities through alignment with pieces of media). But they’re also, at times, scary places to be. To be offered up to a world that, as a non-internet personality, you aren’t part of, for the potential judgement of audiences is a strange concept. Inevitably, many of the comment sections collectively see fit to sexualise the participants, particularly the women. The insidiousness of people having a space to share their thoughts, often very explicitly, about normal people who are walking down the street, doesn’t make it any easier to feel relaxed in public. Is it that these comments are representations of what people are thinking anyway? Or are we increasingly perceiving the people we can see around us in public as Images, to be assessed? Some combination of the two? Either way, it appears that, not too shockingly, if a woman is online, she’s fair game to objectify, degrade, and publicly use the image of for sexual gratification. And while the line between the internet and the real is blurring further into oblivion, this is a terrifying concept.

When violating other people is the way you secure views or put your opinion forward, it takes increasingly shocking content to maintain that platform. For the first time in a long time, this has been noticed on a much wider level. Somewhat recent headlines have championed the voices of young women featured in ‘Manchester nightlife videos’; TikTok compilations of surreptitiously filmed clips where women and girls, often in short skirts or tight tops, walking around in Manchester city centre, presumably on their way to or from a night out. This occupies a confusing space captured in the likes of the Daily Mail: content about young women that is constructed to both encourage the viewer to shame them- their behaviour, the way they present themselves- and to provide sexual gratification mostly ensuing from that shame. It’s an easy sell, particularly because it’s such an overdone way to depict women, especially the stereotypical young Northern woman, with focus on their makeup, revealing clothes, penchants to drink and have fun and feel attractive. The stereotype is so deeply intertwined with class, with the differences in how rich women who fake tan and get their nails done and wear garish outfits are treated compared to working class women being worthy of its own essay. The misogyny and classism come hand in hand, because it’s thought that there’s even less reason to respect the women in these videos: the subtext is that they don’t respect themselves. The women are positioned as untoward temptresses, who you’d never want to associate with, but you don’t have to feel bad about degrading. Except that the women behind these videos in particular had voices, too. 

A TikTok creator herself, Meg talked to BBC news about how the videos affected her. She spoke with empathy for the other women and girls involved, and discussed the wider implications of having videos like this so prominent on social media. She could easily understand the difference between going outside in an outfit she liked, or choosing to post a picture of herself online, and someone else taking footage in a way that meant she didn’t notice them doing so, to rage bait a specific target audience, or worse, to get them off. 

I have no words really other than it just made me feel a bit sick. […] They shouldn't be allowed to be posted online without consent. These videos are creating almost a danger of violence towards women. 

But just because Meg had an easy understanding of why the videos are violating, doesn’t mean their general audience do- check the comment sections of the original videos at your own risk. The comments made about specific women in the videos are bad enough, let alone the ones that justify their right to see it by reminding the subjects that they’re on CCTV anyway, so why is a person intentionally filming and posting them any different? If they’re wearing it in public, then wearing it on the internet is fair game. You don’t need me to invoke the comparison between this sentiment and the ones that we know are often used to justify sexual violence. The reality is that this is the level of empathy and ability to humanise women that many people around us are operating with. Forgive me for feeling the need to commiserate.

The women in the videos look like the girls I grew up with, the women I chat to in club bathrooms, sometimes like me. The fun of stumbling over the pavement arm in arm with a best friend, of having a whole night ahead of you, of debuting a new outfit, is suddenly turned to stomach-dropping embarrassment, violation, when you’re cat-called. But street harassment has a newer digital playing field that opens its victims up to potentially millions. So many people who breach women’s sense of safety, or defend those who do, can’t tell the difference between having an appearance and owning your image; when, in cases like this, it’s a question of consent, that lack of understanding is terrifying.

This returns us to a vital issue of the Image: who decides what’s sexual? The rights to privacy and ownership apply far more heavily to sexual images, but so many of those doing the violating are more gratified by turning an image shared without sexual intentions into something far more sinister. So on what basis is an image deemed sexual in a way that protects and validates women? Is it in the intention, content, or usage? Plenty of content posted by women is perceived as sexual despite that not being the intention, and is thus taken down, ranging from women sharing sex education, to stand up comedy, to wearing an outfit (or, typically, having a certain body type) deemed explicit. But content that’s transcended its intended use to become only used sexually, despite not being sexual in intention or content, and often despite the consent of the subject, is a grey area for guidelines. 

I’d argue that there’s a difference between being sexy and being sexual. I’d also suggest that even public sharing of an image shouldn’t lead to it being repurposed, collated. I’d encourage you to think of the least ‘sexual’ celebrity you know and search her name on Reddit. To look at the kinds of images that are pulled out to exemplify her sexuality. There’s little to no correlation between how much skin she shows, how much she invites attraction, the niche she occupies, how old she is, and how sexualised she is. We can’t afford to keep learning this lesson. An image existing in the public domain and an image being spun by other parties as sexual are two different things, because of consent and ownership. Is that a ridiculous thing to assert?

Well, yes. It’s legal to film strangers in public against their consent. If someone is filming you, you don’t have the right to ask them to stop. You can’t make them show you the image or to delete them. You have legal ownership, copyright, over a non-explicit image you’ve taken of another person, whether they knew it was being taken, wanted it to be, or not. If an image is taken of you in public, it’s deemed that this is reasonable- that you can’t expect privacy. That means you can sue someone for ‘misusing’ an image of themselves if you’ve taken it. Celebrities Khloe Kardashian and Dua Lipa have been sued for posting paparazzi photos of themselves on social media for this exact reason.

Of course, recording people can be a tool in the already limited arsenal of many people who are more likely to be unfairly targeted and disbelieved. Think filming hate crimes, recording police officers, one of the very few lines of protection against those with power, and even then one that’s easily ignored. It’s truly important that this right isn’t lost. But the way watching content involving strangers filmed without their consent has become a norm means it comes at the cost of our everyday privacy, knowing we could be recorded or posted in ways we don’t like. Essentially, what this all means is that there’s very little you can do about you picture being used in a way that makes you uncomfortable, unhappy, or ashamed. Knowing this means a lot of us are walking around feeling watched 24/7- if we could be captured at any and all times, we might as well be, so we might as well act like it.

It’s not just the videos that are used to shame women going about their daily lives, it’s a sentiment I’ve heard expressed more and more recently. Particularly in big cities like LA, New York, London, people are aware that at any moment in the club they could be in the background of someone’s Instagram story, on their doorstep they could be featured in a TikTok. I’m sure there are some people out there who don’t min it, but everyone I’ve heard mention the phenomenon feels watched, and feels the need to constantly present and hold themselves as such.

Is the only act of defence we have to relax and just exist anyway? To look back at the spectators? In my experience, making the men who stare at me in the street aware that I know what they’re doing yields no change. That’s where the power is- when it doesn’t matter if what they’re doing is identified. No consequences, no regret will ensue. Maybe it’s not always about consequences. If the effect of being looked at, being a walking, talking image, is that your personhood, your three-dimensionality, your humanity is threatened, then looking back out of the image is an act, a shattering of passivity for you, at least. It’s not necessarily protective, but it’s somewhat subversive. To get through each day we have to acknowledge that we’re not images to be looked at. We’re synaptic sparks, encoded memories, lungs filling and emptying, stomachs churning, hearts thudding, hands reaching out across the perspex divide. Photographer and film director Agnes Varda put it best in the quote you’ve seen repackaged a thousand times:

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.”