Literally, scopophilia means the ‘love of looking’ and, since its theorisation, it has been combined with expressions of sexuality, sexual pleasure and, in particular, with the development of voyeurism and the male gaze in cinema and gender studies. In film studies, building on psychoanalytic theories, the concept of scopophilia has been widely employed to describe the process of pleasure that the spectator feels watching films especially within conditions of darkness and apparent isolation offered by the cinema environment. Through her influential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey advanced a critical analysis of Freud’s essays to describe how the act of looking turns into voyeurism, as sexual gratification deriving from observing others in secret. In this case, the observer (the voyeur) does not present a real interaction with the person being observed and the viewer gains satisfaction from watching in an active controlling sense. In cinema, the activity of watching films has been widely considered a voyeuristic practice and, since the proliferation of social media, the Internet has also been seen in a similar fashion.
Developing this discourse, Denzin highlighted how the conditions offered by the cinema contributed to the growth of voyeurism and the voyeur gaze as commonplace aspects of contemporaneity. Indeed, the interest for peeking into other people’s lives existed long before the rise of reality TV shows and Big Brother. Denzin claimed, reminding of Mulvey’s argument, that technologically facilitated voyeurism begins in the early 1900s with the arrival of the cinematic gaze. At that time, the audience was physically located within dark theatres recreating an environment similar to the keyhole part of a voyeuristic secret imagery. A similar condition can be seen in the use of the Internet, where personal devices serve as keyholes or windows through which the observation can take place. Calvert described this as ‘mediated voyeurism’, where the consumption of images and information about others, frequently at the expense of privacy and disclosure, is pursued for purposes of entertainment and through the means of the mass media and the Internet. Calvert argued that voyeurism is not necessarily connected to sexuality, as it has been widely argued since its first theorisation. Following this line of interpretation, voyeurs are interpreted more as curious observers that are interested in what they cannot see and seeing what is otherwise not supposed to be seen.
Digital World and Contradictions of Public Privacy
