Deborah Orr
rails impassionately against the creeping progress of the surveillance or "transparent" society (thanks to my mum for bringing my attention to the article). The conclusion to a highly thought-provoking piece:
[M]aybe the transparent society really is sinister, for reasons that are spiritual rather than practical. Maybe it is unhealthy for a society to behave itself not because it is underpinned by morality and watched by its caring family or neighbour, but because it knows it'll get caught and punished if it doesn't toe the line. Maybe we need our privacy not because we want to hide particular things, but because we need a place where we can retreat psychologically, whenever we want, and to be alone and unobserved. Wise parents understand that their children need their privacy to be respected, even if, in their privacy, they do nothing unusual, remarkable, or wrong.
And maybe, our watchers, with the power to watch us, and the inclination not to be watched themselves, are inevitably corrupted by something inherent in the process of believing that there is nothing they can't see.
This all raises more questions than answers for me, as I try to imagine with my feeble little brain how the shifting patterns of information flow might actually play out in the evolution of society.
The only thing that seems certain is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to control who one's audience is (for all the world has been a stage for a while, after all) as one goes about performing identity in all but the most secluded, un-networked places. Will that fact encourage us to conform to rigid, lowest-common-denominator social mores, or conversely serve to free us from the inhibition that can come from being over-aware of one's audience?
Hum...
Labels: identity, supersurveillance, surveillance, transparency
