[Excessum]

I have wondered about it for a while now... what's the deal with showing faces of people during a TV show with a Picture in Picture (PiP)? Be it a live news report, or entertainment show, you often see people from the studio/audience/innocent bystanders focused on in the PiP on the corner of the screen.

An example to show you what I mean:



So I was wondering, since it is a rather common thing on Japanese TV... why are they doing this? Is it a psychological/ cultural thing? Or is it just a weird tradition, that has not other meaning? If this is the case, then how and why did it start?

I assume it could be something like the the annoying laugh during western TV sitcoms... another phenomena I do not quite understand... do the authors think their audiences are too stupid to understand when to laugh and when not? But that is another topic.