What's the word for the fallacy or cognitive blindspot of just kind of forgetting that a cameraman exists? Like, you see a video online and you take it as an unmediated representation of reality and forget that there's someone there recording it? E.g., seeing a video of an ill-tempered child pitching a tantrum over a Christmas present and you leap to thinking that they're just very naughty without remembering that their parent is literally there publicly humiliating them for clicks.
I think that a lot of of our media is just kind of structured around this elision of "the cameraman", broadly defined. Like how many hundreds of hours of footage do they take for reality TV and what makes it into the final cut and why? The editor's not neutral; they're making decisions. What stories make it onto the news? What posts does the algorithm deign to show you? Our lives have never been as mediated as they are now, and yet this mediation is largely invisible.














