Big Brother. The Panopticon. The All Watching Eye. In a society increasingly saturated with surveillance, information environmentalist Zack Denfeld has come up with the term panopticonfidence. Speculating that a side effect of an Orwellian world could be more thoughtful, conscious and expressive actions and gestures on the part of the overexposed citizen.
On the other hand, there is the counter-presence of sousveillance–a term from Steve Mann to describe “watchful vigilance from underneath.” Many a man, woman and child operating cameras and all manner of mobile imaging devices propagated over the networks–a dispersed and inversed surveillance. Once activated by a network, chance sousveillance acts like The Zapruder film, Rodney King video and more recently the Michael Richards incident–these unplanned documents become weaponized information. Mann describes an applied set of sousveillance activism in Issue Three of the journal Surveillance and Society , describing his strategies of shooting back as a model for “[problematizing] social interactions and factors of contemporary life…with the goal of social engagement and dialogue.” There is still, as Mann admits, the risk of sousveillance acts effectively strengthening and expanding the coverage of dominant control mechanisms. Mann suggests in a more recent article in Ctheory that the tactic of inverting/subverting a dominant ideology or structure to critique it is no longer effective. Double detournement is upon us– “is there really an inverse?” –asks Mann.
Outside of an arms race type cross-fire of cameras escalating with over exposure of personal information for everyone…the end scenario of this inversion (whether engaged citizens emerge or not)–there are other ideas that work zig-zag and sideways, drifting outside, or rather in between sur/sous, us/them, binary oppositions. Zack Denfeld, in regard to his Blue Puddle project, writes “Instead of users giving up information about themselves and their daily activities to be data-mined by multi-nationals or worse, Blue Puddle actively encourages citizens to track resources that are undocumented and to modify their local built environments.” Users post and tag images of their own derives…collaboratively creating a map that relates back to their everyday environment. A hybrid space of real/virtual social networks— dialogue encouraged in less confrontational manner than some of Mann’s agit-prop.
So, panopticonfidence could also mean more thoughtful, conscious and expressive image construction on the part of the over-equipped citizen. Such as an exposé of free power sources in one’s physical neighborhood…which may or may not lead to a more engaged sense of place/place for engagements. But works towards empowering (so to speak) without putting one’s personal info on(the)line. “Literacy is not just the ability to sort out and digest media information, it is also learning how and when to author messages, so one can…actually alter the nature of the immediate media environment” suggests Tom Sherman in AFTER THE I-BOMB. Moving towards an “object hyperlinking” hybrid world of networked RFID’d objects and places, Sherman’s words ring more literally than figuratively in regards to projects like Blue Puddle.
Panopticonfident compositions that exhibit strong design and potent imagery will also make memorable impressions on the tagging hordes. Check out Carnegie Mellon’s ESP Game for an exercise in parsing image potency and refining the ultimate search engineering. What word resonates most informatively? Amongst thousands, what word sheds such descriptive light that it transduces into that one image?
In the blindingly bright, free of shadows, everything exposed light of all this, a figure like the Bigfoot may be pursued for possible apprenticeships as it is a creature well versed in stealth manouevers and strategic (in)visibility in spite of on-going scrutiny. It knows how and when to author messages. It seems telling that the belief in cryptozoological animals constitutes a break from official hierarchies of knowledge with figuratively blurry evidence and theories. This mystery is what attracts speculation. The architecture of participation in this mystery is what the Bigfoot thrives on. Panoptic pleas for less blurry evidence (real/virtual) seem counterintuitive to the Bigfoot’s symbolic power as an alternative figure of power and knowledge that is neither totally exposed or totally covert. Instances of blobsquatchery, while discounted by many Sasquatch researchers as optically aided errors of judgement, may in fact be an implosion (not inversion) of the panopticonfident belief that total exposure is the key. What do the cryptids represent in a surveillance society? What of an aesthetics of confusion? Hovering between states of signal/noise, sur/sous, us/them, squatch/blob.
