A reaction to a National Geographic Magazine article on surveillance and control.
"Watching You", by David Shenk.
National Geographic Magazine, NOVEMBER 2003.
note: I read the article in the magazine form. Here is the link to an excerpt of the same article online.
_Progenitor
At a time when rhetoric about national security in America is as mentioned as the word 'the', National Geographic Magazine publishes an article about the new modern global craze for surveillance. Indeed, preventing crime should be a service best left to the experts, putting up the cameras. This article explains in a simplistic, seemingly neutral stance that the cameras are already up, and we have already been, and are being watched.
For the most part I enjoyed reading this article, not only because it mentioned the Panopticon (one of my favorite analogies for surveillance control), but also because I took pleasure in scoffing every time the author referenced the 9/11 terrorist attacks (7 times in as many pages). In a story about how the many, varied ways we as a global society are becoming more obsessed with watching ourselves technologically, it didn't address issues about how this specific observationalist behaviour shapes people's outlook on public spaces, privacy and power of corporations to observe anyone within a surveillance camera's range. Rather, the overall momentum of the article was certainly to inform the average literate American, but it also unquestioningly emphasized fear's omnipresence as a light-hearted caveat to balance the wonder factor. Of course, this is a non-profit, status quo publication (with quite a bit of mega-corporate sponsorship ads inside, btw) which does its duty to feverishly inform the masses of global studies. It even printed an avid reader's letter from Eugene, Oregon. Where the hell is Eugene? Good thing this is not college. Even though Nat'l Geographic is a non-profit mag, I believe it is catering to the value system currently in place about the world we live in, and are viewed living in. But I'll get to that soon enough.
The author's stance was since the wake of a post-9/11 America, we have got ourselves up in a hussy-fuss with national and regional security. The terrorists shot us in the back, so to speak, and now we're scared. We're trying harder and harder to subvert crime, criminals and now terrorists with technology. Yet the author, a Mr. David Shenk, fails to investigate how such scrutinizing surveillance is a mindfuck. I mentioned beforehand that Shenk touched on the concept of the panopticon, the famous prision structure which transcends all observable control to the guard tower. All the cells are in a donut-shaped structure, and in the center of the hole is the shaded-windowed guard tower. It is built this way so every inmate in every cell knows they could be observed at any time: a mindfuck. The point of this prision design was to exert distanced control over the prisoners and place them in a reality of psychological warfare against what they percieve as the threat of surveillance through involuntary submission of their privacy. Or, the way your employer can monitor every call, email or internet transmission is waving your right to privacy in exchange for the security of your job, for example.
But surveillance is a mutated double-standard. We currently live in the age of surveillance for things like entertainment, establishing fear/tolerance issues we shouldn't be having makes it a triple-standard. Reality-TV shows are surveillance-turned prime time, and somehow convince us that watching beautiful people get tangled in situational webs of mistrust by the show's producers and psychiatrists (often the same mental health doctors which aid the producers in exploiting their contestants, then stroke these contestant's damaged egos in exit interviews) is positive programming, but contradict the notion that surreptitous surveillance is not good. Somehow, irony acts as blinders to truth and as an excuse to tolerate them. That's a mindfuck. Once again these shows, akin to the article, make us at once fascinated with these technological abilities to observe the once unobservable, whether for profit or for securitry, yet also feed us the line that we are involuntary to their control to watch whatever we do. In other words, new technological advencements in surveillance will definetely make the streets safer whether or not this was post 9/11 America, but their banal presence empowers a faceless entity which, if confronted would exclaim, "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!"
I was uncertain as to exactly how to ingest the following pictorial segment of Shenk's piece. Oddly enough, it was at this point I reminded myself of the Microsoft, Toyota, Ford, Shell Oil, Honda, Bank One, GMC, Intel, Rolex, a GE-sponsored television show about fighter pilots, a pharmeceutical ad, Gateway, KIA, Allstate Insurance, State Farm Insurance and Energizer battery ads in this non-profit magazine. The editors printed a large-point type inside a double-page spread of the Menwith Hill surveillance radio towers (for monitoring ordinary telephone and email transmissions in a secret program known as Eschelon) which says, "What (George) Orwell did not prophesy in his novel 1984 was just how pervasive surveillance would be in free societies." To myself, this is either sarcastic juxtapositioning or a bona fide statement, of which it is difficult to determine. If that was meant to be sardonically sarcastic, it fulfills its purpose dutifully and I commend the inventor of the joke. But if that was a serious pov, it's just the line of ironic mindfuck rhetoric that relies on the consumer's ignorance of how America and many other great world powers are these 'free societies' they claim they are to perpetuate this qualm. But the fear-basing doesn't stop in the United States, it covers the earth. Shenk uncovered that Great Britain and several other European countries have implemented such intense surveillance systems, people are calling surveillance the "fifth utility, joining water, gas, electricity, and telephones as an essential public service."
To myself, this sounds like the mindfuck line again. And after a little bit of digging, I found that 67% of the television vein of National Geographic is owned by Fox Cable News Group, under Ruppert Murdoch's empirical News Corporation. A New York Times article here describes a little more of this, and this article from the Atlantic should fill you in about Murdoch. But just because Murdoch's fingers sink even into the glossy National Geographic makes me wary of the latent content. His involvement just proves my point that we should not unequivocally take in the 'news' of the mass media to educate us. Shenk is not a puppet for Murdoch, but he doesn't deviate from Murdochian dissemination of information, which is: information disseminated on a mass scale, information originating from a single source, whic in turn establishes an illusionary, informational symbiosis that creates the status quo. It would make sense to me that Shenk wouldn't mention or even slightly infer that our administration knew the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks were casually videotaped at their respective airports. To do so would not necessarily obscure the value system of appropriate or inappropriate surveillance; it would damage the corporate image and go against the grain of that machine,
and that's how the mindfuck gets you.
My advice? I'm not sure. I've chosen to emancipate myself from television and mass media products (they are products). I've studied Mander, Ang and others about media history. I've always had a sinister feeling from lurching ads, from the hypnotic glow of the tube and from the fantasy worlds they create. None of us live in these worlds they say we can escape to. Honestly? Reading Nat'l Geographic makes me feel the same as when I watch TV- when I read and read and don't take anything away from it except mass information everyone else is getting. Even the photos, as spectacular as they are, are like the fantasy worlds that the TV screen blinks.
Tootles,
PROGENITOR