Surveilling Ourselves to Death

An educational system that makes surveillance acceptable should burn in a giant grease fire

Photo by Aleksei Sabulevskii on Unsplash

Sometimes you just know when a class works. There's a visceral pop that one feels in that moment that you don't need any data or assessment ritual to feel.
It happened to me recently. I'm teaching a class about social media and on this day we were talking about the phenomenon of "Updates," that is, status updates on various social platforms. One of the books we're reading for the class is called The Psychology of Social Media, by Ciarán Mc Mahon. It's part of nifty Routledge series that gives brief, yet thorough overviews about "The Psychology of Everything."

One key concept from the chapter was the way that social media algorithms push "popular" posts in front of our eyes, based on comments, likes, and shares, among other alchemical factors. One outcome of this is to shape our conception of what will make us seen or popular on our favorite platforms. This clearly has important implications, for instance, in how teen girls self-image may be adversely affected by Instagram influencers.

But in general, it shapes us all, forming us, inch-by-inch, in the image of a perpetual social media popularity contest. We've also been looking at the work of Marshall McLuhan and I think the psychological perspective above is another way that media "massages" us. The Medium is very much a Message we shouldn't ignore.

The chapter went on to make connections to the idea of panopticism, the Foucauldian idea that we exert disciplinary power on ourselves when we believe ourselves to be under surveillance. No authoritarian bully has to whip us into shape in order to shape us to his will. We will do it ourselves if we think he's looking.

So I had an idea.

I walked into class that day with my Zoom H4N audio recorder on a table tripod.

"First, let me say that I'm a little concerned with the lack of participation in this class, so I'm going to begin recording our class sessions and keeping track of your verbal participation. I will rate your score on a chart that tracks the number of verbal statements you make alongside the quality of those statements. Your score will be calculated as such."

Of course I did not even turn the machine on. There were no batteries in it even. But I noted the shock in their faces (they actually had been participating just fine). And the hands. The hands shot up for the whole 75 minute session. And when I put them into small group discussion groups, everyone talked and was active. So serious were they about getting a good participation score, they even divided the labor of reporting about their group discussions, so everyone would get a chance to speak even more.

It was, I'm both happy and sad to say, a wonderful, productive discussion. I'm happy when that happens, but sad that they reacted so eagerly to authoritarian tactics.

Near the end of class, I confessed my ruse and everyone broke out in wide smiles of disbelief. They were both relieved and, I must say, impressed with me. Heck, I was impressed with me. I have a terrible poker face and I can't believe my performance. I could have won a daytime Emmy, if not for this darn Actor's Guild strike.

"I can't believe you bought this," I said. "I thought you knew me better than that. Do you think I want to make MORE bureaucratic work for myself? I'm going to start transcribing class recordings?"

There was some laughter, along with some loud sighs of relief.

Then I showed a news report about Chinese developments in "Social Credit." They saw how surveillance was being used to coerce "good behavior," in everyday citizens, even to the point of paying people to submit reports about their neighbors each month. The class, full of red-blooded Americans, was chilled by the idea.

But how can they not see that they're part of a similar regime?

I'm unaware of any government program like that of the Chinese state, but our whole lives are subject to surveillance-based behavior manipulation, since we live so much of it in service to the algorithms.

And even more directly, our education systems, emphatic as they are about assessment and standardization, are forming people who are most comfortable operating under authority, not as free-thinking people. I'm reminded of the men at the end of Shawshank Redemption who are released from prison and have no idea how (or whether) to live.

Look at how successful my jokey experiment was, I urged them. Think about the implications of that.