It's summer so the museum is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., I'm working 4 days a week and listening to a lot of CBC Radio One, that being the sole radio station here in Port Clements.

Today I listened to Episode 7 of Podcast Playlist, and one of the items, The Living Room certainly made me think. Superficially, it's about a woman who at first inadvertently (her new neighbours don't have curtains and their bedroom faces her living room) and then deliberately watches her neighbours. The watching begins with voyeurism and becomes compulsive, as though her neighbours' transition through life over a year had become a private reality-TV show.

During the broadcast, it doesn't seem so creepy. Largely I think because the omniscient author describing intimacies is such a common viewpoint in books, dramas, TV shows, and because we are used to being entertained by the details of another's life.

At times during the show, and certainly since, the whole situation seems somewhat plausible, yet bizarre. For a while I wasn't sure if it was biography or fiction. I'm pretty sure it's fiction... well, almost sure. Maybe based on an event, or an extrapolation from events. I suppose really I want it to be at least 90% or more fictional, as otherwise it's so intrusive it makes me feeling like a voyeur-by-proxy.

It made me think of The Truman Show, Analogous but somehow worse. This isn't a whole set-up centered on one person, it's reducing real people without their knowledge or permission into a passing entertainment, literally a dumb show.

It's a comment both on how easy it is to 'fall into' passively watching others--whether real people through a window or the TV or Youtube--and how despite watching and feeling involved with what you're watching, in reality you're apart from it. The whole mockumentary approach inherent in Reality TV, where people talk directly to the camera. The audience feels included, but it's an illusion.

Well, made for an interesting half-hour.