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every time i think of “the truman show” (and i do more than you’d think) i am struck by how narrow its vision truly was...
the idea that the world would stop to gawk at the mundane life of a boring, stunted white guy seems quaint to me.
the more accurate summation of our time - and i truly say this without a value judgment - is that today we are all one another’s truman.
those of us in social media share a deeply curated and - at times unconsciously - dramaturgically constructed vision of ourselves to others. this doesn’t make it false, or evil (or good for that matter), but rather a democratization of the concept of biography.
to every person out there, there is another who is innately interesting and worthy of study. this interest was once the exclusive the famous - now we all have access to the experience of being studied in some way...
and to many, inadvertently or otherwise, the creation of that self for study is a type of art.
the addictive lure of feeling understood and seen - especially some part of ourselves that cannot be expressed in daily life - is at the core of this phenomenon. i believe that this is a stronger need than even love.
i don’t see this as dystopian, especially if the alternative is milktoast, incurious, truman. this is one way to experience the diversity of human being, both for good and bad - the good is there too, it’s just that the bad has better press agents.
andy warhol famously said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes... i believe that in the present, everyone is famous to fifteen people. the end.
