In early September, following the release of a video showing NFL running back Ray Rice hitting his wife Janay Rice in an elevator, the Baltimore Ravens terminated Rice’s contract and the NFL suspended him indefinitely from the league.
This follows an event in April, when an audio recording of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend V. Stiviano not to bring black people to games was made public. Sterling was banned from the NBA and the league is currently working to finalize the sale of the team to a new owner.
The following month Solange Knowles, the younger sister of Beyonce Knowles, appeared in a surveillance video attacking her brother-in-law, rap impresario Jay Z, in an elevator following the Met Ball. The footage exploded onto both gossip and news sites and sparked a storm of conjecture about what happened that night.
You’ll see a pattern here.
In each case, the people whose words or actions were captured were unaware that they were under surveillance. That’s not surprising. We have grown so accustomed to surveillance that in our day-to-day lives we’ve forgotten the omnipresence of CCTV and other security and surveillance technologies. Cities all over the world bristle with cameras. One estimate puts the number of cameras in London alone at 500,000.
What is surprising is the degree of ease and comfort with which millions of observers of these spied-upon actions passed judgment on what they saw or overheard. This is a function of the normalization of surveillance.
In recent years, as the depth and breadth of government surveillance has become known, we as individuals are increasingly complicit as observers and judges of the actions and expressions of others, even when those actions are ostensibly private. We feel increasingly comfortable with our roles as disciplinarians of others, using observation and surveillance as a means to wield power.
I was first struck by the idea of the normalization of surveillance last summer, when I saw the following Coke ad run during the previews in a movie theater:
[Note from YouTube: This video previously contained a copyrighted audio track. Due to a claim by a copyright holder, the audio track has been muted.]
On the face of it, the ad celebrates acts of decency, romance, courage and kindness. Yet it also normalizes surveillance and the fact that we are now everywhere observed. It makes light of the fact of omnipresent surveillance by focusing only on 1) people who are not doing anything wrong, and on 2) situations that do not threaten the viewer, society at large or the status quo. The behaviors shown are non-controversial.
The ad basically hews to the opinions of many people who, when asked how they feel about surveillance, will say that it does no harm so long as you’re not doing anything wrong. [1]
The rise and tremendous popularity of reality tv shows in the 1990s and early 2000s have also contributed to our increasing comfort with looking into the lives of others. Many of those shows broadcast the domestic and intimate and romantic lives of strangers into millions of households each week, allowing countless strangers to witness the ‘reality’ of other people’s lives. When the shows are competitive, viewers have the privilege of judging the participants.
While the incidents observed and recorded earlier in the year (i.e., Rice, Sterling, Knowles) are disturbing, disgraceful and, particularly in the case of Ray and Janay Rice, devastating, we concern ourselves here not with what we saw but how we saw it and how we seem increasingly comfortable with seeing and observing things that we would not have seen before surveillance became so common. We concern ourselves here with our willingness to comment, to judge and to act on those things, regardless of the means by which we witness.
In the late 18h century the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham championed the construction of a kind of structure, called a panopticon, for factories, schools, madhouses and other institutions in which the supervision of people was essential. The panopticon was a building designed to make it easy for one or very few people to observe the movements of many people. Wooden slats on windows of a central tower (the abode of the observer) hid the observer from the view of the observed. Thus, the observed could never be certain whether they were under observation or not, and so they functioned under the assumption of constant observation.
In the 20th century, the French philosopher Michel Foucault built on Bentham’s concept and developed his theory of panopticism. In this theory, the panopticon becomes a kind of metaphor for the exercise and function of power in society. The ability to observe, and thus to discipline and punish, becomes the central exercise of power in society and a means toward the disciplining of people. Foucault also set forward the notion that by extending the ability to watch or observe to more people, institutions and society as a whole could increase the efficiency and power of surveillance and extend its reach.
Other insightful thinkers have taken the idea even further, especially to take into account increasingly sophisticated technologies. The idea and the metaphor of the panopticon will continue to evolve as our concepts of society and the roles of power and the individual in society evolve. What I want to note here is that we continue to follow the path set out by Bentham and Foucault and others.
The danger is that over time, with increasing normalization, we will be increasingly comfortable not just with judgement, but with denunciation. The danger is that a time may come when we are as comfortable gazing into the lives of our neighbors and denouncing our neighbors as we judge and denounce the famous and the infamous. As we participate in the invasive gaze, we could very well wind up becoming a society in which everyone surveils each other, much as East Germans did under the Stasi.
If that comes to pass, the threats to our privacy and civil liberties will not only be invasive governments or police, or national or international intelligence apparatuses like the UK’s GCHQ or the NSA. The threats will include us.
1. The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s dominant soft drink company. Within the advertising world, it has enjoyed a hallowed track record of creating memorable and culturally influential ad campaigns. The company’s ads essentially invented our modern conception of Santa Claus. It intrigues me that at this historic moment of NSA’s exposure and Snowden’s revelations that the company would launch a campaign that normalizes surveillance.
Image of security cameras courtesy of khunaspix at FreeDigitalPhotos.net