panopticon – Alison A. Lukowski

I subscribe to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, and a host of other websites that ask me to sacrifice my privacy for their use. They ask me to tag my photos, mark my location, and indicate when they were taken. My browser tracks my searches and pushes marketing materials to me. Yes, I looked on Amazon to see if HEPA filters were cheaper there. Now the edges of Facebook alight with advertisements for HEPA filters.

How do I feel about this? Pretty creeped out. If a human being tracked my behavior this closely, I would report him to the police. I’m being stalked. And yet, I keep using these resources. Why? In part, because everyone else is. It’s how I keep in touch with my friends around the country. In fact more and more, it’s how all of us keep in touch. Some articles suggest that sites like Facebook are killing events like the high school reunion. Who needs to go back to a smelly school when a web page can tell you what your high school nemesis is doing?

And with all that, maybe I don’t want everyone to know what I’m doing? Maybe I want to hang onto an outmoded Aristotelian public/private divide that is no longer feasible in this hyper-connected society we live in. Marshal McLuhan described our increasing interconnectedness as a global village. In Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) he writes, “And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence” (32). Like a village, everyone knows your business and you depend on them for your existence.

Is this the world we want to live in? Will we all write in Newspeak someday?

Check out Carnegie Mellon University’s privacy grade website to find out how your apps measure up.

A few days ago, the news blew up with a story about a chapter of ΣAE at the University of Oklahoma. The fraternity members were recorded singing an obviously racist song about not admitting African Americans.

What strikes me most about this story is the power of an individual with a cellphone. The individual must have been “in” with the fraternity enough to gain access and yet shared the video. Surely, the sharer knew the potential consequences of sharing such a provocative material. Was the point to showcase the racism of the members? Shut down the chapter?

Or, do the motives really matter?

The reason the video has power is because we’ve started surveilling ourselves. The government doesn’t need to tap our phones. We hand over our privacy willingly. For a free app or access to a music library we allow corporations access to our locations, purchasing habits, and emails. The government doesn’t need to monitor all of us – we monitor one another.

Of course, this is not an original idea. In the 18th century, utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed the idea of the panopticon. The panopticon allowed a single guard to monitor all prisoners. Today, our cellphones share our data the guards. We move about our self-created cells and report our activities to the monitors.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1975) used the panoptic metaphor to describe the ways in which society normalizes our behavior. Be smart, but not too smart. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be sexual, but not too sexual. Get married. Get a job. (I’m beginning to sound like Trainspotting.) The hegemony of the norm suppresses deviance.

A perfect example of this may be found in universities. Many of my students who were home schooled express shock at how disciplined education is in this country. Free exploration of ideas or just learning for the sake of learning are replaced by quantifiable exams and assignments. Even the technique of raising one’s hand to answer a question demonstrates the ways in which we are disciplined by the system. The guards are always watching.

For Foucault and other post-modern thinkers, this isn’t a hopeless system. Like weeds, counter culture can take root in the cracks of our self-made prisons. They exist together.

However, the closer we monitor ourselves, the easier it is to find the weeds and spray them with Roundup. Counter cultural ideas (even stupid racist ones) are stomped by the normalizing power of the interwebs.