By Edward Targett
Contributing writer
SEOUL, April ― I've become a star, or at least the father of one. Like most celebrities, the first time someone pointed their flashy SLR camera at me or my young family I was mildly flattered.
``What a photogenic and handsome family we must make'' I thought, a beamingly proud pater familias. Photography is a noble art and suddenly finding oneself becoming fodder for an artistic pursuit, although occasionally a little disconcerting, no bad thing on a spring day.
The lack of niceties that occasionally accompany such aesthetic endeavors are similarly no reason to feel alarmed, I told myself. Artists are after all largely known for their eccentricities and not for their polished social skills. Let it be.
Things have changed. It's out of hand. I'm close to shaving my head, attacking the paparazzi with an umbrella, or just sticking a firm digitus impudicus up at the next lurking group of college students who think all of life's beautiful moments have to be trapped, stored and mediated through a little 2-inch square fleck of LCD.
It appears that every country seems to have its own take on the obsessive tendency to video or photograph everything remotely unusual; it's all part of the Youtube/Myspace/Cyworld scene that is the modern world. Perhaps I should be grateful that these well-dressed and generally harmless college students have such a naive approach to it all: We.are.cute.they.must.snap.
After all, where I call home ``happy-slapping" is the order of the day. Smack, hit, whack, generally thump someone, anyone, get your friends to record it, and circulate it amongst yourselves. Hilarious! ``Did you see his face?'' Britain's youth, officially the unhappiest in Europe according to a recent UN report, are very egalitarian in spreading their malaise.
When I was actually battered round the head ― insult being added to injury ― with a folded pink umbrella by a gang of teenagers also wielding camera phones in central London, 'twas all for the joy of the spectacle my beating could provide; the slapping was real and in this world, the happy was a 2D version in some dystopian desert of the real.
South Korea's fraying imperial map is not quite as violent, but the assault I have begun to feel upon being snapped rather than slapped is equally distinct.
Guy Debord wrote in his seminal ``Society of the Spectacle'' that ``all that was once directly lived has become mere representation'' and that images have supplanted genuine human interaction.
It's hard to find a better example of this than a sunny day in any palace garden in Seoul: I push a stroller along gently, enjoying the sunshine. My young son points excitedly at the magpies and waves happily at any passing stranger who smiles at him.
Then crowds of students or young professionals, wielding their digital cameras, surround us. No exaggeration. I've had a crowd of 10 people pressing around us with their misshapen black digital tools uniformly pointed like sniper's rifles, oblivious of to whether I may or may not be pleased with this assault on my personal space and first hand experience of a sunny day.
It is not solely the act of intrusion that bothers or offends me however. It is that it is emphatically impersonal. Nobody has come into my space to push their ideas, or unpleasant opinions ― all of which I find completely bearable and on occasion stimulating, even if it is someone who wants me to meet ``their friend Jesus'' - or simply say ``hello.''
No, what has happened is that someone has made me part of a spectacle. ``The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people mediated by images" says Debord. The image (my happy family and cute son) has become a commodity, freely available to all consumers.
If, as the Frenchman says, the history of social life can be understood as ``the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing,'' then this condition, which he writes is the ``historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life,'' is well upon us.
And yet where Debord encourages the use of detournement, ``which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle,'' it doesn't seem to have worked for Britney. Distracting a spectacle with a spectacular image is clearly fighting fire with fire.
So now when I see the lens caps come off as we approach, I don't tear off my shirt and run berserk at the paparazzi, ― who if they want to put their cameras down and come and chat are quite welcome ― get out of my limo with no underwear or inject a syringe of blood on their expensive toys (nice idea Pete Docherty).
No, I would like to do all of the above, but I politely (and Korea is, I have generally found other than this mad exception, a decorous country) offer a firm but friendly ``사진을 찍지 마세요,'' and hope that this is sufficient to prevent my life, my family, the sunny day itself becoming merely an unreal adjunct to a broader spectacle in which we are as frozen as our smiles, in a myriad of little pixels.
Cheese!