In a Watched Society, More Security Comes With Tempered Actions
That’s the subtitle of an excellent article in the Washington post entitled The Picture Of Conformity. It talks about how people change their behaviour when they know they are being watched, which unfortunately is more often all the time.
Some of the greatest cultural and scientific advancements have been made by those who do not conform to the norms of society or current thought. I’m concened that the pressure to conform brought by a surveillance society will supress those people and ideas – which is not a good thing.
It starts off with
Don’t look now. Somebody’s watching.
But you knew that, didn’t you? How could you not? It’s been apparent for years that we’re being watched and monitored as we traverse airports and train stations, as we drive, train, fly, surf the Web, e-mail, talk on the phone, get the morning coffee, visit the doctor, go to the bank, go to work, shop for groceries, shop for shoes, buy a TV, walk down the street. Cameras, electronic card readers and transponders are ubiquitous. And in that parallel virtual universe, data miners are busily and constantly culling our cyber selves.
A few excerpts:
All this surveillance, monitoring and eavesdropping is changing our culture, affecting people’s behavior, altering their sense of freedom, of autonomy. That’s what the experts say: that surveillance robs people of their public anonymity. And they go even further, saying that pressure for conformity is endemic in a surveillance culture; that creativity and uniqueness become its casualties.
“You need a sphere of immunity from surveillance to be yourself and do things that people in a free society take for granted,” says Rosen. Things like going to the park or to the market. The loss of such autonomy is one of the “amorphous costs of having a world where there’s no immunity from surveillance.
If we know we’re being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior, how does that change our actions?
Call it “anticipatory conformity.” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades, coined the phrase in 1988.
Applying that concept to the post-9/11 era, Zuboff says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense.
“I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness,” she says. “We know, for example, when we’re going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we’ll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It’s within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom.”
We self-censor, she says, not only to follow the rules, but also to avoid the shame of being publicly singled out.
Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms. The habit has been set. People have “internalized the surveillance architecture” within their own subconscious.
I’ve touched on some of these issues before (look under “privacy” on my tag cloud) – this article states the issues very well.
