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people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S.
     six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of
     hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today support- and social groups for persons with precisely
     these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around
     other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let’s call the average U.S. lonely person Joe
     Briefcase. Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when
     other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear, come across,
     to watchers. He chooses to sit out the enormously stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.
    But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them on the
     screen; They remain blind to Joe. It’s almost like voyeurism. I happen to know lonely people who regard television as a veritable
     deus ex machina for voyeurs. And a lot of the criticism, the really rabid criticism less leveled than sprayed at networks,
     advertisers, and audiences alike, has to do with the charge that television has turned us into a nation of sweaty, slack-jawed
     voyeurs. This charge turns out to be untrue, but it’s untrue for interesting reasons.
    What classic voyeurism is is espial, i.e. watching people who don’t know you’re there as those people go about the mundane
     but erotically charged little businesses of private life. It’s interesting that so much classic voyeurism involves media of
     framed glass—windows, telescopes, etc. Maybe the framed glass is why the analogy to television is so tempting. But TV-watching
     is different from genuine Peeping-Tomism. Because the people we’re watching through TV’s framed-glass screen are not really
     ignorant of the fact that somebody is watching them. In fact a whole
lot
of somebodies. In fact the people on television know that it is by virtue of this truly huge crowd of ogling somebodies that
     they are on the screen engaging in broad non-mundane gestures at all. Television does not afford true espial because television
     is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We’re not voyeurs here at all. We’re just viewers. We are
     the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone: E Unibus Pluram. 1
    One reason fiction writers seem creepy in person is that by vocation they really
are
voyeurs. They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody who hasn’t prepared a special watchable self. The
     only illusion in true espial is suffered by the voyee, who doesn’t know he’s giving off images and impressions. A problem
     with so many of us fiction writers under 40 using television as a substitute for true espial, however, is that TV “voyeurism”
     involves a whole gorgeous orgy of illusions for the pseudo-spy, when we watch. Illusion (1) is that we’re voyeurs here at
     all: the “voyees” behind the screen’s glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we’re out there. And that
     we’re there is also very much on the minds of those behind the second layer of glass, viz. the lenses and monitors via which
     technicians and arrangers apply enormous ingenuity to hurl the visible images at us. What we see is far from stolen; it’s
     proffered—illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we’re seeing through the framed panes isn’t people in real situations that
     do or even could go on without consciousness of Audience. I.e., what young writers are scanning for data on some reality to
     fictionalize is
already
composed of fictional characters in highly formalized narratives. And, (4), we’re not really even seeing