Seduced by the screen: From both sides of the gaze

Thinking about Gaze A: The screen observes us

I am imagining what a digital voyeur would see if they could gaze out of the “screens” in schools across New Zealand at all the student faces gazing in.  I am reading “Blown to bits – Your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion” by Abelson, Ledeen and Lewis.  It explores the social and political notions of privacy, identity,  freedom and who is in control in the digital world.  It is an easy read, and full of topical examples that clarify the many provocative issues raised.

The first thing “Blown to bits” made me realise was that I didn’t understand “privacy”.

“Privacy is not, .... the right to be isolated from society – privacy is a right that makes society work.”

If privacy is a right that makes society work ... then perhaps the lack of privacy in our schools .... might be a wrong that explains why our schools oftentimes don’t work.

Gatto’s seventh lesson taught in school ... “One cannot hide”..... can only be exacerbated by the  exhortations of the hawkers of screens for digital learning. Because the adoption of SMS student management systems, learning management systems (LMS) and increasing calls for transparency in school assessment data sharing must increase the  panoptic like surveillance of students identified by Gatto.

LESSON 7. ONE CAN'T HIDE
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.
I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.The Seven Lesson School Teacher

So what are the social roles that we limit and exclude when students are learning what it is to be human in an environment that precludes privacy?

Blown to Bits argues that for three important social roles for privacy (p63 and 64)

The right to maintain the privacy of one’s personality can be regarded as part of
1.  The right of self preservation: the right to keep your adolescent misjudgements and personal conflicts to yourself, as long as they are of no lasting significance to your ultimate position in society.
2.  The way society allows deviations from prevailing social norms, given that no one set of social norms is universally and permanently satisfactory – and indeed given that social progress requires experimentation.
3.   The development of independent thought – it enables some decoupling of the individual from society so that thoughts can be shared in limited circles and rehearsed before public exposure.  

The passage suggests that the institutional structure of a school is designed to deny students the right to self preservation, to make social progress, and to develop independent thought.   

Thinking about Gaze B: We observe the screen

This thinking allows me to explore Illich’s claim that objects change who we are. 

Brown: So the objects, like a car or even like a school, change who we are.

Illich: Who you are and even more deeply they change the way your senses work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia [?], my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror. Anybody who says, I want to communicate with you, I say can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are. Ivan Illich with Jerry Brown March 1996

This passage from Illich is one of my favourites ... when I read it I always want to switch off the screen and go find a human face that I can gaze at in the way of the old Greeks  ...  Although gazing at someone in a way that “fingers” or “touches”  is an activity that would be viewed with enormous suspicion in the culture of the screen.   Attempting this with the wrong person is liable to lead to uncomfortable exchanges, complaints to authority or even arrest.

What does an object that captures our gaze (aka a screen) do to us?

Or to ask this question another way,

If  the introduction of digital technologies into schools means that students are spending increasing amounts of time immobilised, gazing at the screen ... more time in fact than they do gazing face to face with another or gazing at the dirt and the sky, then how are they changed... ?    

Comments

[Michael Doyle]

"If the introduction of digital technologies into schools means that students are spending increasing amounts of time immobilised, gazing at the screen ... more time in fact than they do gazing face to face with another or gazing at the dirt and the sky, then how are they changed... ?"

I keep waiting for someone else to respond.

In the confines of a room with my face lit by the screen, I am not as certain of the loss as I am when I am sitting outside by a pond watching.

I hesitate to answer because I cannot describe (in words) what is lost.

Humans have the unique ability to wonder (and worry) about the interface, at least those of us who feel (falsely) safely ensconced in the matrix of civilzation.

Today a small frog jumped over my hand. It had been seemingly oblivious to my presence, so I pressed the issue, and it refused to let me catch it.

The frog, obviously, has no idea about the internet, but the same frog, obviously, recognized me as something more than just a few photons hitting its retina that could be safely ignored.

The Illich quote resonates. But so did my frog today.

[pheromones attract women]

Attempting this with the wrong person is liable to lead to uncomfortable exchanges, complaints to authority or even arrest. I definitely agree on this you have a very informative blog!

cletsey