Michel Foucault later made a centerpiece of his analysis of prisons and social order in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish) . And yet, the proliferation of surveillance and security technologies has not made us feel safer and more secure. And the ability to openly watch (rather than spy) on each other’s lives hasn’t brought us together as a people; on the contrary, if Twitter is any guide, it’s further divided us. It is human nature to want to watch what others are doing (and not just other people; consider the popularity of live-feed “animal cams” available on websites such as explore. org ). But as more and more people seek attention in a crowded online universe, the bar for normal attention-seeking will continue to be raised. (As reality television demonstrates, even our home makeovers must now be extreme.) And people will continue to erode the boundary between their public and private selves by performing the most intimate details of their lives online. The fact that we haven’t slid into dystopian authoritarian state monitoring doesn’t mean we’ve escaped danger. It just means we’ve traded one threat for another. Ms. Rosen’s essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The American Historical Review, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
on them; we stay in constant touch with friends and family thanks to them. One study found that we touch our phones about 2,617 times every day . You don’t have to be paranoid to acknowledge that this is a pretty effective form of self-wiretapping. Previous eras worried that the all-seeing eye of surveillance (whether practiced by the state or by an authoritarian leader) would inevitably dehumanize everyone within its reach. Today, thanks to social media and the Internet, we are both the watchers and the watched. Our world resembles a funhouse mirror more than it resembles Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century Panopticon – the infamous “all-seeing” prison design that placed a single law enforcement officer at its center, able to monitor many prisoners at once (which French theorist
Christine Rosen is managing editor of The Weekly Standard . She is a senior editor of The New Atlantis . She is working on her forthcoming book, The Extinction of Experience , to be published byW.W. Norton. Her past books include Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and My Fundamentalist Education .
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