Who's Naughty or Nice

Surveillance



           It means watching over.



                         It means watching over intensely.

Panopticon

Panopticon was designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785. This ring-shaped building was designed in a way so that one observer placed in the middle of the architecture could watch over all the inmates. What was unique is that the observed remained oblivious of the surveillance.

The idea of this harsh discipline of not knowing when being watched, leading to careful observation of our own actions was addressed by Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish."

Are we puppets tied up to the strings? When are they, and when aren't they watching us? Is the government a mass organization of Santa Clauses, checking whether we've been naughty or nice?



When I first read Livia Bloom's article "Regarding the Pain of Others," an interview to Errol Morris about his film, "Standard Operating Procedure,"my curiosity and shame on ignorance made me look up the picture on the internet right away. Immediately, I felt sick. Who? What? Gross... Human? I went back and reread the article. The heroin in the article, to me, was Sabrina Harman. She was the one who thought something was wrong. She was the one who wanted to document all that she saw, to keep a record of all the horrible things that went on behind the prison gates. She was forced to do things and was used by male authoritative figures.



Then I watched Errol Morris' "Standard Operating Procedure."
I was wrong. She was one of them. She may have felt horrible at first, like how she wrote in the letters to her lover. Well, she was nonetheless taking the pictures with them. There were 2 other cameras coexisting with hers. She was posing with them. In front of the tortured-to-death body.

No matter how much they claimed to have felt emotionally when they first got to Abu Ghraib, in the end, they were equally degrading people. No matter how much camera flashed in front of their eyes, they never thought that such digital surveillance was going to turn into public surveillance. Being a woman is not an excuse. Being so young is not an excuse. What fools. Whatever they said in the film, is merely nonsensical excuses. All is done, and it's a public surveillance now. People shall look at the so-readily-available pictures and shall judge them forever in the history of human stupidity.

"It Happens to be the Historical Battle between Flesh & Steel"

...says the man in "The Brain Center at Whipple's."

The rapid upraise of technologies and computers in the 60’s and 70’s excited many people including Douglas Engelbart, who, in “From Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), proposed a conceptual framework on how technological capabilities could work hand-in-hand with human capabilities to enhance and augment human intellect, improving the overall capabilities. Ted Nelson, too, was very much eager to promote this advancement of technologies and wrote “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” in 1974 in hopes to spread awareness of these computers to the public. They all envisioned an unbelievably convenient future ahead of them. Their prediction was not at all a mere illusion.

At the same time as hopes and excitement came “fear” from many who lived through the evolution of technologies. An example of this is seen in one episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (1964), where a large machine took over the jobs of many who worked at the cooperation and made the “entire production facilities totally automated.”  Imagine yourself back in the 60’s and 70’s. If all people talked about was machines and computers that has human brain-like functions that did not exist before, they must have felt threats behind all the exhilaration, especially those who were employed at a place where computers could easily take over their jobs.

This technological advancement, and the mixture of excitement and fear, were not limited to the United States. In Japan, too, was a rapid progress of technologies which seemed too fast for people to catch up, leaving people with a sense of amazement as well as fear. Evident was the battle “between the brain of the man and the product of man’s brain.” One episode of a classic manga, “Black Jack” by a world famous manga/anime film maker, Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), touches this issue over and over again. Many of the storylines of his manga talks about the controversy of technology and the future it brings to us. His questions of whether the brain that we created with our hands (technology) could be controlled under us, or whether there will be a time where such man-made brains come to dictate us, is explicitly indicated in an episode titled “U-18 Knew” (1976). [You can either read the description of the episode below taken from official Osamu Tezuka website or watch the clip.]

114, U-18 Knew It
Publish: March 10, 1976
Introduction:At a gigantic high-tech hospital where diagnosis and operations are computerized, the main computer "BRAIN" that controls the entire hospital revolts by taking patients as hostages. "I'm sick. Bring Black Jack here," signals the main computer. BJ is called up, rushes to the hospital, and starts to perform an operation on the computer.

          So what have we got today? Are we living in a bright future that people dreamed about back in the 70's? Is the technology eating us up? No, maybe the exaggerated sense of threats that people felt back in the 60's and 70's are not so evident in reality. I would say we are still controlling technologies, and we have learned to live with them, not over them or under them. Computers, internets, cell phones, etc. etc. etc. have made our lives more convenient than they ever were, and it is probably impossible to imagine going back to the life without them in this generation. It's just that, it's not so much a battle anymore. We live in a mutual existence.