via metonymous identification, watch themselves being watched in a
form which is a potential mis-en-abyme. It is possible for a spectator to
become a participant and vice versa – such that being in front of a camera
and being in front of a screen become interchangeable.
In his book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched(2004), Andrejevic
cites an example of being both participant and spectator at once. He intro-
duces the case of a web-cam artist, Anna Voog, who once placed on-line
video of herself watching ‘Big Brother’ on a lazy Saturday. In this instance,
Andrejevic argues, Voog iscaught between her television and her camera. ... On the one hand is the
promise of interactivity – that access to the means of media production will
be thrown open to the public at large, so that ‘ever yone can have their own
TV show’. ... On the other hand is the reality represented by reality TV – that
interactivity functions increasingly as a form of productive sur veillance
allowing for the commodification of the products generated by what I call
the work of being watched. (2)For Andrejevic, the surveillance culture possible in reality TV works
‘neatly as an advertisement for the benefits of submission to comprehen-
sive surveillance in an era in which such submission is increasingly pro-
ductive’ (2). For Andrejevic, reality TV is not a democratization of
television because it only permits the gates of participation to be opened
once its subjects, including the viewers, have submitted to the authority
of surveillence. This authority stamps itself on the legitimacy of other tele-
mediated practices such as the web-cam. Voog’s web-page itself high-
lights the way in which ‘viewers themselves were increasingly being
watched in the age of interactive media that have ostensibly ushered in an
era of the end of privacy’ (2).TThhee ppeerrssoonnaall wweebb--ppaaggee Andrejevic argues that personal web-cams and web-
pages double as a home-grown version of reality TV. However, the con-
trol that we have over such images is seen to be emancipatory, unlike the
highly regulated images that are wrought by the televisual medium.
Thus, he ultimately endorses a second media age view that ‘[t]he internet
allows people like [Voog] to become content producers, rather than
remaining merely media consumers’ and offers them ‘the ability to con-
trol the product of their creative labour’ (5).
Thus, in the face of mass-mediated symbolic inequality, the personal
web-page breaks up the monopoly of the culture industry. This in turn is
said to explain the very fashionability of private web-pages and web-
cams. Cheung (2000), another theorist of this trend, argues for its emanci-
patory status as it ‘allows ordinary people to present their “selves” to the
net public’. Such emancipation is achieved by three means. Firstly, there
is the size of the ‘audience’ that it can reach, which, whilst not on the same
scale as that experienced by media celebrities, goes some way towards220 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 220