Viewer Freedom Vs. The Lens' Gaze

I was struck by a comment on a message board from IMDB's page on the HBO Voyeur program. What's the point of this? Asked the anonymous user. What do they want us to get out of this? What are they selling? I think it's rare for users to immediately question the marketing strategy behind pieces of entertainment; the commenter's jump seemed, to me, to be less indicative of a general cynicism and more a result of the confusion of positions of spectatorship that this internet-narrative creates. Unlike the televised component of HBO Voyeur (which received lower viewer exposure than the website), where the viewer's gaze is directed by the camera (which is always framed by the rims of binoculars--much like parts of The Rear Window), the online program has no set direction for the gaze, or fixed duration for viewing specific scenes. The viewer's gaze is completely unstructured, forcing them to direct their eyes along their own narratives--thus the program's intriguing interactivity and sense of realism, thus also the confusion that led some viewers, like the IMDB message-board commenter, to balk. I think this feeling of uncertainty in position of spectatorship led the commenter to jump immediately to a more obvious structuring of viewer/content--forget the confusing endeavor of establishing one's one optical narrative, let's just look at the ad.
Of course, though, there is a larger narrative that the individually-structured sequences of viewing are supposed to uncover. The fascinating second-step to the HBO Voyeur program is the littering of false web pages over the internet, created by HBO for the fictional characters shown in the computer program--Flickr and Photobucket accounts, fake blogs, all with clues to the interconnectedness of the characters and more information about the situations in the original program. This way, the entire internet becomes the setting for a narrative that becomes less about the stories discovered and more about the circuitous, viewer-established sequence of discovery; the viewer's choice of web pages to view replacing the traditional guidance of the camera's eye.
One last, potentially unrelated thing--I'd like to point out the genius of the lack of sound in Voyeur. Hitchcock played with the realism that street sounds and overheard snippets of song can contribute to a feeling of "being there," observing. While also interested in creating a position of voyeurism, I think the scenes viewed through the Voyeur program really divorce themselves from TV programming and film with the use of silence. It really places the viewer in a physical relationship to the scenes viewed--definetely close enough to see, but not to hear.