I recently watched the geek thriller Untraceable, where the above web site was taken from. The show follows the FBI cyber crime unit as they try to track down a crazed computer genius who kills his victims through crowdsourced voyeurism. The more people visited the site killwithme.com the faster his victims died. This started me thinking about our less extreme exhibitionism and the voyeurs who participate in the exchange. There are portions of the social media that are specifically designed around the concept of "presence" which is an invitation to volunteer voyeurism. This week, I Twittered the message:

Never go to a new job thinking what you can learn, they pay you for what you can give and how much money you can make.

and the same day a friend sent me a message on IM asking if I've changed jobs. No I haven't, I just felt it was timely advise that I've been repeating to others who were contemplating moves. Two weeks ago, I turned on the "What I'm Listening To" feature on Microsoft Messenger as I was listening to Belle & Sabastian's The Life Pursuit and immediately a friend started a conversation surprised that I listened to the same music she does and discussed how I missed their concert after I left Australia for Singapore back in 2004. I'm sure this is a common experience for you too both as a voyeur and a "victim". It intrigues me to observe how acceptable voyeurism is in today's internet culture. I'm sure there are people observing others anonymously online, but at the same time, there doesn't seem to be anymore shame in watching the exhibitionist and responding directly to him/her. Even in the show, although the viewers were protected by the anonymity of their computers, they chose to participate in a live discussion in the chat box next to the gruesome video stream as if to say "the responsibility isn't ours, you're the exhibitionist". I feel that services such as MyBlogLog, Facebook's status updates, and Twitter have made us so used to watching and being watched that voyeurism is now mutual. Is this something to worry about or something to embrace? I'm caught in the middle right now because I love Twitter and I'm all for public viewing and responses, but like I mentioned a while ago, I still dare not use Seesmic (think video Twitter) although iSight is staring right at me everytime I use my computer.