Foucault and Facebook

I’m spending the year at Cambridge (that other English university), and aside from the normal cross-cultural confusions­—we have bathrooms, they have loos, we have irony, they have absurdity—I’ve found one difference that I had not expected: in England, we’re always being watched.

The term is Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), and there are about half a million CCTV cameras in London alone (compared to about 3,000 in New York). In the country as a whole, there is one camera for every 14 English citizens. There are cameras that can track you as you walk down the street, cameras with speakers to shout warnings at would-be criminals, even cameras mounted to robot helicopters that fly around neighborhoods.

CCTV’s purpose is twofold. Obviously photo records help the police identify criminals. But even more importantly, the presence of CCTV cameras is meant to deter would-be attackers and carjackers from ever committing their crimes.

Maybe these cameras are good at their first job, but they are very bad at their second. In 2005, the British Home Office surveyed 13 communities that had recently installed CCTV systems. Of the 13, six experienced reductions in crime. In the other seven, crime actually rose, roughly matching national averages. The cameras seemed to work well in car parks and less well in city centers.

One trend did hold steady across the communities surveyed: once the CCTV systems were installed, people felt less safe and more worried about being victims of crime.

To those of you who read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in CC, this whole system probably sounds familiar: it’s a panopticon. But briefly, for those of you who read John Rawls or Catherine MacKinnon instead (or for the four-fifths of the University not in the College): in 1791, the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham designed a new prison. Rather than those long hallways with cells on each side, Bentham’s prison was a well-lit doughnut with one row of cells along the inside of the doughnut and a tower in the center (or should I say, centre?). Guards would be able to see all the cells from the inside of the tower, but the prisoners would not be able to see the guards. The result: none of the prisoners would know when they were being observed and so would behave as if they were always being observed. Order could be maintained in the prison for a fraction of the normal operating cost.

Now, has CCTV turned England into a giant panopticon? Of course England isn’t some sort of Clockwork Orange-style futuristic hellscape (or V for Vendetta-style hellscape, or Children of Men-style hellscape, or 28 Days Later.... For whatever reason, when screenwriters think of bleak, desolate futures, they think of England). But I do think CCTV has had two effects on the country’s politics. First, let’s go back to that earlier statistic—that people feel more afraid of crime and less safe when CCTV cameras are installed. This fear probably helps fuel the anti-terror, anti-personal rights movement that has been so successful in the country (example: England can hold prisoners without charge for more days than any other country. America, of course, holds prisoners for longer, but not legally).

Second, and this is a little more abstract, suppose you knew a camera was watching you in public. Would you be more or less likely to pick your nose? What if you were having an affair—would you be more or less likely to kiss your mistress? What if you just came out of the closet—would you be more or less likely to hold hands with your gay lover? For all three, the answer is probably ‘less’ because a camera isn’t just a passing stranger—it’s the eye of the state, and whatever you do, it records for perpetuity. CCTV probably has the effect of bringing people slightly closer to the social norm and slightly farther away from genuinely autonomous action.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have the space to get into this issue in the way I want to, so let me end by bringing it closer to home. English citizens have had little say in the proliferation of CCTV. Of course people select members of parliament and vote yea-or-nay on levies, yet for those folks who really don’t like the system, well, too bad.

But we Americans (and people of our generation generally) are building our own little panopticons online. Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us (all of which I use) force us to sacrifice personal privacy and, conscious or not, make us more fearful of betraying social norms (at this point, are you really going to put the Postal Service as your favorite music?). Of course, the scope of this problem is contained in a way CCTV is not—we can always shut down our accounts. Still, we are quickly establishing a norm online: that to access any site or service, we have to forfeit anonymity and autonomy.
Being the paranoiac that I am, I find it a little funny and a little troubling that while the English have grudgingly accepted their panopticon, we have so eagerly embraced ours.

Brendan Ballou is a Columbia College junior majoring in philosophy. Philosophical Explanations runs alternate Tuesdays. specopinion@gmail.com