Any one of those passive eyeballs has the ability to begin spawning this type of viral content and summoning a remote audience of idle eyeballs to watch.
Hence, architects now have to design "with two distinct functions in mind, as sports and entertainment centres playing host to live audiences, and as sports and entertainment studios serving the viewing and listening requirements of the remote audience".
Technology at the Sundance Film Festival is reaching audiences like never before, and this year, Blue Jeans Network debuted its new interactive online events service Primetime, to enhance attendee engagement and offer active video participation for remote audiences.
Tired of the dull and straightforward concert footage flooding the internet, Kenzo and Kanye's team worked to capture the energy, intensity, and visual dynamism of Kanye's famed live spectacles on film so that remote audiences could relive that moment.
Even on DVD, where one could easily answer prompts with a remote control, audiences rejected getting too involved with storytelling.
Like westerns and baseball films, movies about the experience of black Americans may be seen as too remote by audiences in countries that have little cultural connection to the subject matter.
The slight drawback with a session featuring a big name like Bill Bryson is, of course, that no one is going to pay £20 for a ticket unless they are a fan, making any chance of a lively critical contribution from the audience remote.
The band was forced underground, able to play only in remote locations for audiences gathered by word of mouth.
But in the end "Brideshead" still stands as the sine qua non of mini-series — "a relic from the 'Shogun' era, before the universality of remote controls sapped audiences' patience," Steve Sailer wrote in The American Conservative.
Which meant that the biggest of the British bands - Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Rolling Stones - followed the dollar and effectively became American groups: as remote from UK audiences as the Allman Brothers (who never played Britain until after guitarist Duane Allman, their star attraction, had croaked) or the Grateful Dead.
Politics aside — if politics can be set aside, given the escalating cycles of fear and resentment on both sides of a West-Islam divide — variety and geographic dispersal might partly explain why the art of the Islamic world remains so remote from Western audiences and literally hard to see.
