We Are Watching People Who Are Watching People

Do people increasingly take the easy way out?

I sometimes wonder about this while watching television — or, more precisely, while watching people on television who are watching television.

Consider Gogglebox.

The program shows ordinary people sitting in their loungerooms watching other television programs. They laugh, argue, become shocked, make predictions and occasionally speak to the dog. We sit in our own loungerooms watching them sit in their loungerooms.

Apparently, watching television is no longer enough. We must also watch other people watching it.

Perhaps the next logical development will be a program showing families watching Gogglebox. We could observe their reactions to the reactions of people reacting to another program.

Eventually, someone will make a program about people watching people who are watching people watching television.

It may require a diagram.

This reminds me of the Andy Williams song Music to Watch Girls By, which contains the wonderfully circular idea:

The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by.

Watching people who are watching other people is evidently not a modern invention. Television has merely discovered how to package it, add advertisements and call it prime-time entertainment.

Reaction has become a product

YouTube has taken the idea even further.

There are countless “reaction videos” in which someone listens to a song, watches a film scene or plays another person’s video while we watch their face.

The title might promise:

VOCAL COACH REACTS TO FREDDIE MERCURY

or:

HEARING THE BEATLES FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Sometimes the reaction is thoughtful. A musician may explain a chord progression, a singing technique or an unusual change in rhythm. A filmmaker might point out how lighting, editing or camera angles affect a scene. Someone with specialised knowledge can reveal details that an ordinary viewer would otherwise miss.

In those cases, the original work becomes the starting point for something new.

But other reaction videos involve someone playing almost the whole of another person’s work, pausing occasionally and saying:

“That was amazing.”

Then the video continues.

A few minutes later, it is paused again.

“I didn’t expect that.”

This may be followed by a thoughtful nod.

It is difficult to know what has been contributed. The original artist supplied the music, performance, composition, recording and emotional impact. The reactor supplied a chair and facial expressions.

There are also podcasts and YouTube channels that replay substantial parts of somebody else’s program while providing only occasional commentary. The creator has done very little original research or presentation. They have simply placed themselves beside another person’s work.

They are not necessarily stealing it in the legal sense. Copyright and fair use can be complicated, particularly when criticism, education or parody is involved.

But there is a simpler question we can ask:

What have they added?

Everything begins with something else

Of course, very little human work is produced from nothing.

Writers draw upon their experiences, conversations, books and memories. Teachers use knowledge developed by generations of scholars. Historians study documents left by people who died long ago. Biographers depend on letters, interviews, diaries, photographs and other people’s recollections.

A biographer cannot personally witness the childhood of someone born a century earlier. The information must necessarily be second-hand.

That does not mean the biographer has taken the easy way out.

A good biography may require years of research. The writer must locate information, check conflicting accounts, distinguish evidence from gossip and arrange thousands of disconnected facts into a coherent story. The source material came from other people, but the selection, interpretation and presentation belong to the biographer.

The same distinction applies to criticism and commentary.

A thoughtful critic adds understanding.

A teacher adds explanation.

A comedian adds humour.

A historian adds context.

A biographer adds research and interpretation.

Someone who plays nearly an entire video and occasionally says, “That was interesting,” may be borrowing the meal and contributing only the parsley.

It reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Red-Headed League. Jabez Wilson is paid handsomely to sit in an office and copy an entire Encyclopaedia by hand. The task produces nothing new and serves no useful purpose. It was invented merely to keep him occupied elsewhere while criminals tunnel beneath his shop.

At least Wilson had an excuse. He did not know that his work was pointless.

Some podcasters perform the modern equivalent. They copy — or replay — someone else’s material, add a few words of their own and present the result as new content. They may not be copying an encyclopaedia by hand, but they are still reproducing work without adding much knowledge or insight.

The important question remains: What have they added?

The important issue is not whether we began with somebody else’s work. We all do that in some way.

The issue is whether we transformed it into something worthwhile.

Famous for being famous

This brings me to another modern mystery: the celebrity whose principal achievement is being recognised as a celebrity.

There have always been people like this.

Many years ago, certain personalities regularly appeared as guests on television talk shows. The host would introduce someone as a “well-known personality.”

Well known for what?

Usually for appearing on talk shows.

Why were they invited onto talk shows?

Because they were well known.

It was a perfectly closed system requiring no detectable achievement.

Today, social media has made this process much easier. A person may accumulate millions of followers because they are already followed by millions of people. Their fame becomes both their qualification and their occupation.

They are interviewed because they are famous. The interview makes them more famous, which qualifies them for another interview.

Nobody wants to be the person who admits:

“I know that this individual is important, but I cannot remember why.”

Perhaps that is no longer relevant. Celebrity need not be the result of achievement. Celebrity itself has become the achievement.

Is the grandmother on the couch important?

This returns us to the grandmother sitting on her couch with a dog on her lap, offering her opinion about a television program.

Is she important?

Perhaps not in the traditional sense. She may not have written a symphony, discovered a medical treatment, won an Olympic medal or governed a country.

But she may be entertaining.

Her observations may be sharp. Her arguments with her husband may be funny. Her dog may have better timing than many professional actors. Viewers may recognise their own families in that loungeroom.

Perhaps that is what Gogglebox actually offers. We are not merely watching people watch television. We are watching human behaviour. The television program is only the stimulus. The real entertainment lies in the personalities, relationships and differences of opinion.

In that sense, the participants are contributing something.

They are contributing themselves.

The same can be true of a good reaction channel. Sometimes we enjoy a familiar song again because we are experiencing it through someone who has never heard it. Their surprise restores some of our own original excitement.

It is a little like taking a visitor to a place we have seen many times. We begin looking at it through fresh eyes.

Perhaps the grass is not always greener next door. Perhaps it merely looks different when viewed from somebody else’s loungeroom.

The difference between using and adding

It would therefore be unfair to dismiss every reaction program, biography, commentary channel or television personality as lazy.

Some are undoubtedly creative. Others are informative. A few may even improve our appreciation of the original work.

But the dividing line remains important.

Are they using another person’s work as raw material from which to create something new?

Or are they merely standing beside it and collecting some of the attention?

There is a difference between discussing a painting and placing your signature in its corner.

There is a difference between analysing a song and making surprised faces while the song does all the work.

There is a difference between documenting someone’s life and rearranging information copied from other biographies.

And there is a difference between becoming well known for accomplishing something and accomplishing something by becoming well known.

Perhaps we are responsible

We might be tempted to blame television networks, YouTube creators or celebrities for offering us increasingly second-hand entertainment.

But they continue producing it because we continue watching it.

Every view, subscription and comment tells the algorithm that this is what we want. If millions of people wish to watch someone listening to a song, someone will record themselves listening to it.

If viewers want to watch families watching television, television will provide families watching television.

And if that becomes too ordinary, perhaps we really will be offered a program about people watching Gogglebox.

I would probably watch the first episode.

Purely for research, of course.

Perhaps importance no longer depends entirely on what people create, discover or accomplish. Perhaps it depends on whether enough of us are prepared to watch them.

If that is true, the grandmother sitting on the couch with a dog on her lap may understand modern celebrity better than I do.

And somewhere, another person may already be recording themselves reacting to her.