In his review of the 2002 Paul Schrader film Auto Focus, Roger Ebert noted that "From its earliest days, home video has had an intimate buried relationship with sex." This comes up because the film is about Bob Crane, the star of Hogan's Heroes who became infamous for his recorded sexual exploits. It is also an acute point of departure for a dissection of a key problem that FC faced while arguing for the unifying power of the Internet.
For all the online meetings of strangers that turned into marriages and for all the ways in which the Internet took people sitting in their offices to foreign lands, FC knew full well the shortcomings of communications technology. He had no illusions about the difficulty of overcoming a central characteristic of all media, and he continually wondered if empathy would be achievable. Today, in spite of the appearance of virtual worlds like Second Life, I'm sure he would continue to question.
When it comes to generating empathy, the problem with all media is that they turn subjects into objects. Different media provide different leverage for artists and writers to exploit in an attempt to generate empathy (if that's their aim) - or something like it. Their success depends on the artist (such as Werner Herzog) and the disposition of the consumer of that story, photograph, or film.
But photographs first and films later have proved especially potent at objectifying. The proliferation of pornography is the paramount example of this. And what is particularly interesting is that both film and photographs have enabled subjects to objectify themselves. Bob Crane not only filmed his sex life but was also known to watch his own home movies, turning an experienced life into an observed one.
And so we come back to Ebert's point about the connection between film technology and sex. There is a fundamental relationship between them, demonstrated not only by Bob Crane but the huge numbers of amateur porn sites now populating the Web, including home movies. Part of the world of sex is about submitting to instincts (which itself presents a problem to the idea that we might be driven to go beyond biology) but part of it is related to this allure of objectifying the subject, of turning people into objects.
Porn is built to a degree on the need to be lusted for, and new technologies have enabled that at a once unimaginable scale. But while amateurs, for instance, who submit their own photographs to sites find satisfaction in the knowledge they're being seen, on some basic level their satisfaction also comes from seeing themselves. Porn, with this marriage of sex and technology, has enabled us to turn ourselves into objects. This wasn't something easily done before film and especially before the Internet. Without a drive to do that, to objectify the self, there would be no one submitting their favorite shots.
The same holds true for sites that are not pornographic. FC would learn with little surprise that some of the most popular sites on the Web today are Youtube.com and MySpace.com. While these are forms of communication that don't have that strong bond of sex/objectification/technology, they are notably focused mainly on film (as opposed to text) and they are based on users submitting their own material, often of themselves. They are, in addition to sites for drawing attention to ourselves and meeting strangers, platforms for objectifying ourselves. It's no accident that they've become tremendously successful.
This underscores the primary weakness in FC's theory that the Internet is a crucial means for us to realize our primal drive to understand and be understood. Why? Because it is questionable if either can be attained - if the subject/object problem can be overcome - online.
