A camera in your kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, toilet—being under constant surveillance will make anyone more aware of their actions and how others may perceive them. At the turn of the millennium, Josh Harris, a dot-com kid who rose to his wealth with his company Pseudo, attempted to model the privacy loss that occurs as a result of the Internet with his two experiments: Quiet and We Live in Public. Quiet was a closed, underground community in which the participants were followed by cameras 24/7. With We Live in Public, Harris subjected himself and his girlfriend, Tanya, to constant videotaping in their New York City loft and streamed their video live online, available for anyone to watch. When designing Quiet, Josh hoped to determine
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Who says that that’s necessarily bad? It may be, and we’ll find that out. It might be that you get so intimate with people in that intimate moment that you really get to know them. Or maybe we get people going to Bellevue. We’re not quite sure.” (We Live in Public) As we learn at the end of his two experiments, the loss of privacy that is the main theme of Harris’s experiments certainly does not make moments more ‘intimate.’ These two experiments, documented in the movie We Live in Public, are twisted and perverse; the participants complain about and become negatively affected by the loss of privacy they perceive. However, in many ways, Harris’s experiments echo the reality of the digital age. Like the Internet, Harris’s surveillance is panoptic in nature: ever-present and all-knowing. As supported by Harris’s experiments, the loss of privacy that we perceive when we use the Internet occurs in part because, like Michael Foucault claims, being under constant surveillance in a panoptic environment causes people to constantly feel watched and in part because, like Saadi Lahlou claims, people are forced to reveal information and act in a setting in which they normally would …show more content…
“Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic function of power.” (Foucault, 1979, p. 201) However, this power does not necessarily come from the person sitting in the tower of the Panopticon and watching. As Foucualt explains, the power rests in the system itself and not necessarily the people in power. “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.” (Foucault, 1979, p.201) In Quiet, one could argue that Harris is the person in the tower, exercising control, but in actuality, the citizens themselves appear to at times be the ones observing from the tower and at other times the ones in the cages being observed. When Harris subjects himself to We Live in Public, he is no longer the one in control. “Josh, with we live in public, he crawled into the TV set, he was finally inside the TV set without the control in his hands.” (We Live in Public) Who has the control? The audience watching him online. “It wasn’t just the cameras were on us, we had other people entering our mind share and assisting in
Who says that that’s necessarily bad? It may be, and we’ll find that out. It might be that you get so intimate with people in that intimate moment that you really get to know them. Or maybe we get people going to Bellevue. We’re not quite sure.” (We Live in Public) As we learn at the end of his two experiments, the loss of privacy that is the main theme of Harris’s experiments certainly does not make moments more ‘intimate.’ These two experiments, documented in the movie We Live in Public, are twisted and perverse; the participants complain about and become negatively affected by the loss of privacy they perceive. However, in many ways, Harris’s experiments echo the reality of the digital age. Like the Internet, Harris’s surveillance is panoptic in nature: ever-present and all-knowing. As supported by Harris’s experiments, the loss of privacy that we perceive when we use the Internet occurs in part because, like Michael Foucault claims, being under constant surveillance in a panoptic environment causes people to constantly feel watched and in part because, like Saadi Lahlou claims, people are forced to reveal information and act in a setting in which they normally would …show more content…
“Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic function of power.” (Foucault, 1979, p. 201) However, this power does not necessarily come from the person sitting in the tower of the Panopticon and watching. As Foucualt explains, the power rests in the system itself and not necessarily the people in power. “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.” (Foucault, 1979, p.201) In Quiet, one could argue that Harris is the person in the tower, exercising control, but in actuality, the citizens themselves appear to at times be the ones observing from the tower and at other times the ones in the cages being observed. When Harris subjects himself to We Live in Public, he is no longer the one in control. “Josh, with we live in public, he crawled into the TV set, he was finally inside the TV set without the control in his hands.” (We Live in Public) Who has the control? The audience watching him online. “It wasn’t just the cameras were on us, we had other people entering our mind share and assisting in