I was watching a hockey game on television earlier today, and was fascinated watching what the people who attend these events do when they're there. Hockey fans are pretty well known for banging on the plexiglass that surrounds the ice rink, but what really interested me was that some of them will suddenly stand up when the game has paused near them in an effort to be seen from afar by one of the cameras broadcasting the game. When a person stands, who are they hoping to be seen by? Is it by someone they know are watching at home or in a bar, or is it just to be on television?
If I choose to watch television, or read a newspaper, or look at a blog online, chances are that I will see someone's face that I have never met personally, and when I look at them, there is generally a recognition that the fact that I am seeing them outside of my immediate physical space (for example, the street I may be walking down) is 'normal' and acceptable; in other words, it doesn't shock me or seem strange. But what if I were to see someone on television that I know? Why should this seem so unusual?
For me, the strangeness would be that my personal experience with someone interrupts the fact that I have become used to having relations with images of people that I don't know, and the artificiality of that relationship becomes apparent when the physical and represented in front of me. It's like seeing a celebrity in line at the grocery store that you've seen on television many times; you know that they must really exist outside of the television, yet the reality of their existence is absolutely shocking. The space between the represented and the actual has become, for me, a space where emptiness and surreality allow me to be human, and to feel temporarily free.
To be 'recognized' by strangers, in front of other strangers, and somehow still to feel real to myself, is an idea that I am truly a fan of.
