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Cynthia Gauthier

December 12, 2006

Project 1Reflection

 

My flip book is going to explore the ideas of the panoptic mechanism that American citizens are now growing up with.  America’s younger generations are growing knowing that they are being watched.  Today’s technology has helped to aid this.  It is a known fact that there are security cameras all over.  It is also well known that every move made on the internet can be surveiled.  There are so many aspects of life that can and are now being watched.  You never know when it is going to happen, but you know it always can.  No matter how alone you think you are…there are technological ways for a person to be observed.  In his book “The Virtual Community”, Howard Rheingold wrote that “the term ‘Big Brother’ bring to mind a scenario of a future dictatorship held together by constant electronic surveillance of the citizenry; but today’s technologies allow for more subtlety that Orwell could have been foreseen” (Rheingold, p312).

            I am going to use images that are personal to me to represent my views of growing up in today’s society with the knowledge we have of being watched.  I live across the street from the Detroit elementary school that I attended when I was younger.  I am going to use pictures of myself as a younger child standing in front of that school and images of myself looking out of my bedroom at the school now.  To me, the school represents normalcy, something that has been and is still is a staple of the American Youth’s life.  I will throw in images of security cameras, computers, websites like Myspace, e-mail accounts and binoculars that will gently fade in (but not fully) and out of the flip book’s main images.  The last images will be of me standing in front of the school.  I want to have pictures of kids entering and leaving the school that I am going to fade into and out of the flip book periodically.  I also intend to get images of cars passing by to throw in.  The image of me as a child will not move until it fades into the image of me now.  Over all, I want this flip book to show that as a child grows up, technology swells and gets more complicated, but also much more wide spread.  A child now grows up knowing that they can and will be periodically watched.

            My flip book will either be created in Premier, or through a series of webpages that I will design.  Either way, the internet is my medium because my flipbook will be posted online, which will attribute to the idea of surveillance through the internet and my views on being watched.  I will put myself out there for the world to watch.  In a sense, my ideas and thought will also be subject to surveillance.  Once I initially post my project to the web, I plan on asking several internet users, of various backgrounds, to view it and give me their feedback.  I plan on asking those who have no idea what my project is about, that way I can get a neutral, unbiased point of view.  Once I get their answers, I will make edits to my project however I see fit, which in turn will hopefully make my project much more successful.

            I believe that being watched affects ones decisions and behavior.  People act much differently when they know that they are a spectacle for someone else.  How many people think twice as they enter an empty elevator?  I know I do.  Not that I would act any more differently in an elevator that I was alone in as opposed to being in a full elevator, but it is the fact that many elevators have cameras, and I know that there is someone on the other end of the camera’s monitor that could be watching my every move. 

Through today’s media, children are exposed to so much more than even today’s college students were at a young age.  Take the hit TV series “CSI” and “Law and Order: SVU” for example.  Children whose parents allow them to watch these shows see just how every move a person makes can be recalled and used as evidence to keep someone out of incarceration, put them there, or to bring justice to someone who has had a crime committed against them.  It is unbelievable what is done to enhance an ATM’s surveillance video from months before to see that the Ford Mustang parked a block away has a one inch scuff shaped just like the letter “j” over it’s front passenger wheel well.  The second a person steps out onto a city street, they are bound to be picked up on at least several surveillance cameras over the course of just one block. 

I think that the fact that I am going to use images in the public sphere as well as alone in a bedroom will help with my thoughts of being watched in public as well as in the privacy of ones own home.  Anyone who goes online can have their actions watched.  The scary thing is that certain forms of being watched on the internet are legal.  Take the popular sites Myspace and Facebook for instance.  People can search out a specific person, see the information that they have posted as public, see the last time that this person was online, and in some instances, see what they said to others and what was said to them.  AOL Instant messenger is another way of being “stalked” on the internet…although not illegal, and you can hide your status, anyone can add your screen name as a “buddy” and see when you are online and when you are not if you do not have your screen name set as away from computer or offline.

It is now common knowledge that e-mails can be surveiled by providers, and by the government, for any suspicious activity that could relate to illegal actions including terrorism.  A somewhat odd thing that I just stumbled upon is the fact that through SBC Yahoo Mail, users are not allowed to ever completely erase their file attachments.  My father’s account for instance has close to 12,000 attachments that have he has sent, and that have been sent to him.  There is no way to delete them.  They go all the way back to when his SBC Yahoo account was created.  If there is a way for a user to see all of their old attachments, then I am sure that SBC Yahoo and the government can go into an individuals attachment and e-mail archives.  “…The most potent weapon will be the laws or absence of laws that enable improper uses of information technology to erode what is left of citizens rights to privacy” (Rheingold, p.313). 

Society is changing, and the way in which children are growing up is very different than it was a decade ago.  Common knowledge of surveillance and its capabilities are widespread and influencing the actions and thoughts of society.  With my project, I am not trying to say that panoptocism is a bad thing.  There are obvious benefits to surveillance like the fact that it can help solve crimes and often prevent them as well.  There are common forms of surveillance that many people have in their own homes and do not even think of as ‘Surveillance’, they are called baby monitors.  They are used for the safety of infants as well as for the comfort and convenience off the parents.  Surveillance can also be useful to help crack down on the issues of adults preying upon children online as well as national security issues such as terrorism.  But…

Surveillance is everywhere, and even children are learning it at a young age.  It is not just the old saying “mom’s have eyes in the back of their head” that children think about when they are about to act.  Pretty soon, they will be thinking like the outer party in Orwell’s “1984” and saying that they know “Big Brother” is watching. 

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