Internet Panopticon

TorporIndy has a post entitled “Dog Poop Girl.” Torpor links to this story and describes it as follows:

Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet’s Power to Shame

If you no longer marvel at the Internet’s power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.

Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.

The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.

What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.

One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular Web site. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname, and issued a call to arms for more information about her.

So now, we’re pretty much in the Panopticon.

Back in the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham was trying to devise a prison that would ensure the maximum degree of order among its inmates. He suggested that the most order could be had if the inmates were under constant surveillance. That not being especially practical, second best would be when the inmates thought they were under surveillance at all times or at least they might be. So, he proposed an architectural solution he called the Panopticon. It was essentially a doughnut where the inmates were all in backlit cells with big windows facing the center. In the center was an observation tower where the guard could see into the cells but the inmate couldn’t tell whether he was being observed at a given time.

With present technology, we all pretty much have to assume that there is a chance we’re being observed and/or recorded at any given moment. I suspect that will have the effect of 1) creeping us out; 2) improving our behavior somewhat; and 3) lowering expectations of appropriate behavior to more accurately reflect the actual norm rather than some fictitious idealized norm.

On the other hand, Bentham’s Panopticon also made provision for the inmates to be unable to see or communicate with other inmates. But, I’d argue that’s somewhat immaterial. If you are potentially being monitored at any given time, that might tend to make your comments more circumspect.

Michael Focault summarized the principles of the Panopticon:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.

Enough situations like Dog Poop Girl and the inmates, that is to say all of us, will be on notice of the unverifiable potential of being observed. But, I suppose we are missing the element of visibility. There is no visible, central authority. Just the potential of a howling mob. I’m honestly not sure which is more frightening.

Update Turns out, I’m not even the only one to make the Panopticon association with the Dog Poop Girl. Via Technorati I found this post which states:

I think that what [Foucault] meant by this is that however dangerous the idea of a Panopticon may be, with a minority controlling a majority, how much more dangerous would it be for the majority (or what passes for the majority) to compel conformity and neutralize independent thinking.

The minority of today was the girl with poor community spirit, but tomorrow it could be anyone or anything. Appearances are everything, like in this other “example of dung”: an old friend of mine went to work in Holland for a few months and rented a cottage in the country. One Monday he discovered his car covered with excrement. Someone from the village, far from liberal Amsterdam, suggested to him that this might have happened because he had washed his car (and so performed manual labor) on a Sunday. The pretty twitching Dutch curtains at the windows of his neighbors are today the cameras in the mobile phones of the travelers on the subway.
. . .
On the same topic, I believe that the debate about privacy is important. Not so much for the observed as for the observer and commentator. It has been proved that the larger the tribe and the greater the anonymity, the more frequent and cruel are the ‘lynchings’. The Internet is so large and so anonymous… As regards the observed, taking away privacy results in conformity. This is not only a theory but put into practice in politics and demonstrated by social psychology.

In addition to the Dog Poop Girl, the author mentions street security cameras and the Star Wars Kid.