The Importance of Watching the Watchers |
The brain thrives on information like the lungs thrive on oxygen.
Surveillance emerged from law enforcement, criminal, and penal backgrounds.
Some important sources of potential surveillance are under your control.
Surveillance comes naturally to the brain because of its need for explanations for events and, most of all, for people, both individually and collectively. Why this? Why now? What does it all mean?—these kinds of questions. The brain thrives on information like the lungs thrive on oxygen.
Nothing creates anxiety more than the unexpected and the unexplained.
In general, the more we learn about a person, the more likely it is that the accrued knowledge can be put to some kind of use. This is especially true when it concerns knowledge gathered by widespread surveillance of the actions of many people at once.
Surveillance is particularly valuable for a government, whether it be a democracy, an autocracy, or an oligarchy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that we currently live under the most sensitive and extensive surveillance in our country’s history. How did we come to this?
Beginning in the late 18th century and up until the present, surveillance has been dedicated to detecting and controlling crimes and criminals. Surveillance techniques date from the panopticon—a design concept from 1787 that made it possible for a single security guard in a prison to observe multiple inmates without their awareness of being an object of someone’s surveillance.
The design of the panopticon, as envisioned by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, ensured that prisoners would never know at any given moment whether they were being observed. Bentham referred to the resulting uncertainty produced in the prisoner as “the sentiment of invisible omnipresence.”
One hundred sixty-two years later, George Orwell, in his novel 1984 (published in 1949), captured the agonizing uncertainty created by surveillance: “There was of course, no way of knowing that you were being watched at any given moment…you had to live…in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
Today, Orwell’s 1984 panopticon-like covert surveillance has moved beyond penology to become a feature of everyday reality.
We’ve become accustomed to closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in shopping malls operated........