Share
Perceptions Shows

Balcony.

'Perceptions' is the common name for a type of reality show usually shown on grey or black-legality stations. It involves cracking a target's augmentation safeguards and 'riding along' during a normal day, experiencing all that the target perceives. Of course, only the most interesting 'normal days' make it to the actual programs, save those programs which focus on specific fetishistic audiences. The chief object is to entertain an audience, in part through crossing whatever standards the local culture has with regard to privacy.

An enhanced variant known as an 'Actions' is a more full-sensory recording rather than the more typical optical and audio track. For the truly voyeuristic a there are is also 'Concepts', which taps into the subject's pre-existing neural augmentation to reconstruct (sometimes with artistic embellishment) a subject's thought processes. Blackmail and espionage are occasionally a profitable sideline for all of the Perceptions shows and their variants.

In regions where the legal protection against being subject to such a show is lacking or ineffective, sensible sophonts who do not wish exposure of this kind keep their augments upgraded, limit contact with the local net, are alert for inductance systems in headrests, headgear and the like and maintain the best possible hygiene against rogue broadcast and recording nanobots.

Some individuals with exhibitionist tendencies actually seek to be 'victims' of a Perceptions show. Others, once a show is published, may seek a share of the profits. Still other persons, with varying degrees of consent, may be involved in contests in which the object is to make one's opponent the subject of a show.

There is a subtler version of the Perceptions concept that involves tracking the subject through the local technosphere or angelnet, including private as well as public spaces, rather than through augments. There are also equivalents to Perceptions for sophonts who live in virches or who are ais sharing the same computronium substrate; some of those variants are even more thoroughly invasive than a typical 'Concepts' show.

 
Appears in Topics
AugmenticsDaily LifePerformance
Proscribed, Semi-legal and Illegal Activities
 
Development Notes
Text by John B; additions by Stephen Inniss
Initially published on 29 September 2003.

 
 
>