Agrarians turned industrialists no more. We have become a nation of watchers. One step removed for the service industry touted in the popular media, a quick glance at the Yahoo! search engine reveals 405,000,000 Web page hits using the search criteria “watch group.” Even discounting the jewelry, watch and clock makers captured in this data set, and the occasional reference to The Alaskan Poop Moose, it appears there are an inordinate number of citizens watching other citizens.
In addition to the standard “watch dog” groups fighting neighborhood crime through the bonding of citizens united by their common concerns regarding a shared community, we watch not only directly but indirectly.
We watch birds (11,900,000 Web site pages on Yahoo!) for education and enjoyment and then we watch people and companies thought to potentially harm those birds. We watch whales in disbelief at their size and majesty (132,000 Web site pages on Yahoo!) and then we watch those groups we fear do not represent those mammals’ best interests.
Circuses are watched for both enjoyment and cruelty to animals in the United States (Circuses.com) and Australia (Circus Watch WA). ZNet, an expanded online version of ZMagazine, represents themselves as a community of people committed to social change, hosting watch groups representing 34 separate causes, including Mainstream Media, Web, Gender, Economy, and Foreign Policy watches. Youth Crimes Watch, DogWatch, Casino Watch, Hate Watch, Palestine Media Watch and Hmong International Human Rights Watch exist to either prevent wrongs from happening to a particular group of people or animals or to monitor and broadcast ongoing injustices in the world.
No cause is too small or too obscure. Movingscam.com is an organization “dedicated to providing solid, impartial consumer education and to working for better consumer protections in the moving industry.” Beaver: Wetlands and Wildlife (BWW) is an organization created in memory of Dorothy Richards, the “Beaver Woman,” and has grown from a local watchdog group in the State of New York to a “recognized authority of the beaver … the keystone species of North America’s wetlands.” BWW researches solutions to beaver/human conflicts, works against anti-beaver legislation in multiple states, and once placed a giant, inflated beaver on the steps of the Capitol Building in Albany, NY to “symbolize the enormous importance of the beaver to the ecology.”
No one is left out. GLAAD is dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation , Beyond IRC Network features an Extraterrestrial Intelligence Watch and the late Al Shugart (widely considered a pioneer of the disk drive. according to Widipedia), created Friends of Ernest, a Bernese Mountain Dog, billed as a citizens watchdog organization created to promote public interest in our government systems. Al Shugart, the man behind the dog, ran Ernest as a Congressional write-in candidate for California’s 17th district during the 1996 election.
PC World asks “who’s watching the watchers? Here’s a partial answer: FM Policy Focus, formerly FM Watch, a coalition of financial services and housing-related trade associations holding government-sponsored monopolies accountable to homebuyers and taxpayers and specifically dedicated to monitoring the activities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was at one time watched by FM Watch Observer, a group billing itself on the Internet as “some folks at Fannie Mae” who “decided it might be helpful to let people know the truth” about FM Watch.
The premise is so civilized. We watch and document while others watch and document us. No one gets out of line. At least not for long. Or at least not without consequence.
If only terrorists played by the same rules. An Infidel Watch Group to counter Janes’ Terrorist Watch, Winds of Change and Terrorist Watch. Rumor Watch and Oil Empire (a Website designed to “. . . provide perspective and a different paradigm for understanding current events” and featuring 9/11 haikus) would then monitor the Infidel Watch Group to ease our urban-legendish fears regarding potential future attacks.
Lance Winslow III (founder and President of WashGuy.com and the Orderawash.com network) has updated his Lance Winslow III Foundation site to include a page he titles National Terrorist Watch Patrol in which he encourages all Americans to create Neighborhood Watch patrol programs and actively distribute information and pictures of suspected terrorists.
IntelCenter offers a free weekly e-mail report from their Watch Board updated to show “developments of note concerning terrorism, rebel groups, weapons of mass destruction, critical infrastructure, instability, threat levels, intelligence and other related areas in both the cyber and physical realms.”
We watch and watch with a breathtaking combination of sincerity, naivety, anger and a fundamental belief in the power of goodness. We watch sports, we watch the news, we watch sit-coms, we even watch reality TV, one step closer to action. We watch for the enemy. Evildoers. Emphasis on “do.”
