http://www.break.com/index/trapped-in-an-elevator-with-diarrhea.html

hahaha… =)

Even if the guy in the elevator was heard he’d probably still have been ignored. There’s been something on the news in the north of england about some poor man that was knocked off his bicycle by a stolen car and killed on the dual carriageway outside of the city of manchester. He was knocked unconscious but might have survived had anyone stopped to call for an ambulance. Instead the evening traffic swerved around him, more than one car, according to police, hitting his body long after the initial collision. A disgusting version of concrete island, though of course I don’t wish to appear sanctimonious.

Re White Noise – it’s one of the funniest books I’ve read but i couldnt get into anything else of his. I wonder what the book about the cctv watching girl in sweden is called…? If I wasnt so lazy I’d google it.

Sean, I agree (and so, I believe, does Paul Virilio as it happens): addressing the camera is the equivalent of staring at the Eye of God.

Ian, yes I would watch — and did! To wit the YouTube footage at the start of the post. Did you see it? The only DeLillo I’ve read is White Noise and I loved it. I felt it was like an American Millennium People, very black, very funny. And your idea for a reality TV show: isn’t that what Ballard’s “The Enormous Space” is ostensibly about? See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk0H3AnjyOA.

What you’re doing is so car-crash good – most of us just keep watching open-mouthed.

It might seem like we’re not watching the monitors – but we are watching – and knowing we’re part of something never done before…

I’d watch. Wouldn’t you…?

Virtual Death: The Game Show (Or half the nation takes to the toilet) …. Would that mean a million wannabes with spiky haircuts would be trying desperately to get stuck in elevators and office toilets?

More seriously, anyone read the Don Delilo novel about a woman somewhere in Scandanavia that likes to watch cctv in her apartment and one night witnesses a crime? It sounds vaguely Ballardian, but I know probably won’t be.

Idea for a reality show: Welcome Home. Trap unassuming “contestants” in their own homes and secretly film them via cctv. Watch as they exhaust the potential of their own possessions.

“Talk to God? Talk to you?”

Is the camera visible? Wasn’t God a weak-force version of CCTV or the Panopticon before cameras were made visible? Didn’t always work, some still sinned anyways, but the same can be said with ubiquitous CCTV. In this case a monologue with the camera would be the contemporary version of prayer, wouldn’t it?

Or, put in different terms, when physically trapped in a material inner space doesn’t the camera offer a portal to a presumed outer space — even though (logically) it’s still actually inner space itself?

I am. Ballardian is probably my favourite blog. I’m not much of a commenter though.