Parlance rants 2: Eclectic nuanced view
A viewer in its natural habitat. Photo: Matthew Krummins. License: CC BY 2.0
I already went on record ten years ago with my disdain for the term “content,“ and nothing in the decade since has softened that position. In fact, here’s another entry in what I suspect will, against my better judgment, become a recurring feature: Parlance Rants.
I hate the term “viewer.”
A “view” exists, in the sense of a vista with physical reality, but viewing that view is, weirdly, an entirely passive concept. Isn’t even an activity, it’s just something that happens when your eyelids are lifted and brain switched off. “Viewing” gives no sense of engagement, appreciation, response or recollection. The viewer is akin to the first primordial invertebrate with the first photosensitive cell. When you apply the term to a human being it reduces the whole miraculous human experience to an eyeball, a neurotransmitter purveyor being juiced up by retinal cells and dumping little dopamine hits to the downstream brain.
There’s a whole constellation of related pernicious terms here, from “views” and “clicks” to “engagement” and “impressions,” but “viewer” seems to me a uniquely flaccid, milksop term. Thus it follows that “viewer” is the most passive and non-contributory entity imaginable. Think through the possible synonyms—observer, spectator, watcher—and tell me that there’s a more pusillanimous way to express the concept of “taking in visual information.” The passive “onlooker” is a pillar of strength and attentiveness by comparison.
As a child of the 80s whose parents presciently loathed television I never expected to see a world where “watching” something gives, relatively speaking, an impression of dynamism and purposefulness. But “to watch” is a veritable flurry of activity when compared with “to view.” Hunting dogs watch. Chess grandmasters watch. Foes watch and guardians watch. But when I think of “view” it conjures up an image of a scallop with its rows of weird stalk eyes.
Yes, I’m overreacting. But like "nomen omen, the word we use for a thing shapes perception of it. I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to say that there are huge economic and technological forces deployed over the past two decades towards capturing and monopolizing attention on digital platforms. That attention—or more precisely that disinclination to look away—is perfectly captured by, and encapsulated in, this squib of a term. Viewer. Ugh. It even sounds gross. Let’s all be something else, please.