the gaze 2.0, redux
What has it been, an hour or so or so, since I outlined some of the claims about new media that are circulating in the blogosphere?
(Everytime I use that word - blogosphere - I can’t help but feel a little guilty. I know Swarming Media blogs on wanting to off the word, but I haven’t had a chance to read that entry yet. I do get a sense, though, that the most popular of the terms used to describe blogs, social networking sites, user-generated content, etc. are quite imperfect, sacrificing the diversities of the Web for the simplicity of catch-alls.)
It has only been an hour or so, yes : well, perhaps three, perhaps six before this is posted : but I want to spend some time considering the last claim about surveillance.
From that entry : 4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.
Nathan @ Swarming Media has written on vision & the panopticon in two entries at his blog. The two - Seeing and Being Seen & The New Self-Regulating Subject - fit together rather coherently. Hopefully, I can sum them up here without doing significant damage to Nathan’s writing.
(Note to the reader : Yup, right now, I rely heavily on Swarming Media : that’s because that blog is so damn good.)
It seems to me that the heart of Swarming Media’s take on panopticism is articulated in “The New Self-Regulating Subject.”
Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.
The components of this statement recur in “Seeing & Being Seen” : distribution (& decentralization) of the panopticon; “identity traces,” which are left in other users’ (conceptualized both as a multitude of others & an other / swarm of the multitude) fields of visibility; & participation in a mass regulation of others’ identity traces. The sum of these components is put succinctly in another Swarming Media entry:
If the disciplinary society was defined by the controlling individual / controlled mass duality, then this new control society is defined by the reversal of that duality: the controlling mass / controlled individual.
It occurs to me that this entry might read like a Very Short Introduction to swarmingmedia.com. So I’ll try to move on. But before I do, one final thought on the imagery of this version of surveillance, especially that of prisoners-with-binoculars. What’s clever about this image is that it accounts for the appropriation of the means of surveillance to (re)view the activities of those authority figures who like to hang around the panopticon. You know, the ones who used to do all the watching. At the same time, it accounts for the decentralization & multiplication of fields of visibility, which makes possible the “controlling masses.”
If this reading of Web panopticon is correct, then efforts to enforce centralized surveillance & control on the Web is regressive; it is as if policy-makers interested in controling Web use are relying on architectural designs ill-suited for the Web. (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link on McCain’s proposal to create a national database of illegal images.)
Professor James Doyle of Duke University observes something happening in the transformation from Bentham’s model to the one outlined by Nathan. Indeed, Doyle might call this transformation a slippage; not that power decreases, but that our capacity to see power as power diminishes when the panopticon becomes decentralized.
If the first conclusion of this study is that the state may actually have more power than the digerati believe, the second conclusion is that the attractiveness of technical solutions stems not simply from the fact that they work, but that they apparently elide the question of power — both private and public — in the first place. The technology appears to be “just the way things are”; its origins are concealed, whether those origins lie in state-sponsored scheme or market-structured order, and its effects are obscured because it is hard to imagine the alternative. Above all, technical solutions are less contentious; we think of a legal regime as coercing, and a technological regime as merely shaping — or even actively facilitating — our choices.
Technological solutions : think filtering software, site “ratings,” etc : (this article dates from 1997) : does not signal the end of power & the liberation of the end-user, free to choose which privacy & security devices to use. It involves something more complex : the “hardwiring” of power - sometimes state power - directly into the “technologies of freedom.”
Ten years later, it seems that Swarming Media contributes an update to Doyle’s work. Doyle was largely concerned with the seepage of the state into technology; Nathan might be arguing that the Panopticon has seeped into the design of this new Web . Seeped, I say, because the architecture has changed, but the effects seem to be more or less the same.
I mean, who needs John McCain, ISP surveillance, & messy debates about privacy, what constitutes obscenity, & the reality of digital depictions of bodies when volunteerism - code or some Net-savvy boys - will do the work for you.
EP
PS : I’m not as down on visibility as I sound. I swear. I’ll get to that & the pleasures of visibility some other day.
Posted in surveillance, Web 2.0, the gaze |
February 11th, 2007 at 6:48 am
[…] post by empty panopticon and software by Elliott […]
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