Visibility and Knowledge

I'm tempted to engage head-on with the McPherson, since it ties in so well with my criticism of video games as presenting the experience of freedom while subtly constraining actual freedom. I think, though, I'll save some of that for class, and instead talk about the Colomina and McPherson articles in concord.

Visibility and viewership are central ideas to the internet, ones that lie just behind the buzzwords McPherson so clearly marks out, words like 'choice', 'presence' and 'possibility'. Presence, in particular, is interesting when discussed in terms of the internet's power to make one feel like they can be anywhere, do anything, literally achieve a God's eye view (thanks to Google Earth). But while this permits the experience of presence, an idea that is very temporal in its root - the being both 'there/here' and 'then/now', the internet produces the experience that is so central, according to Colomina, to the production of these peculiar bunker-esque houses: privacy. The sense that you are watching, but not being watched in return, is crucial to the experience of the internet, as well as television and cinema. Look no further than 'Rear Window' to experience the terrible uncanniness of having your previously unmeetable gaze returned.

With television, as David Foster Wallace points out in his article on the medium 'E Unibus Pluram', there is a strange interplay between gazing and wanting to be the subject of a gaze. Celebrities, the famous, the beautiful, are all people who are skilled at appearing unwatched while being aware of being watched. Being watched is coveted, since it is analogous to being important, but one must not acknowledge that gaze, not choke up and get stage fright. Gazing while being unseen is safe, but it is alienating and limiting, placing you in the position of second class citizen within the culture of the view. The excitement over Web 2.0, depicted so often as liberating and egalitarian, is a promise to short circuit this process. Suddenly the viewer has the chance to be a the viewed just as easily; it offers to dismantle the viewer/viewed hierarchy by fusing the two together.

Yet for some reason there is this insistent desire to maintain privacy, one that should be carefully considered and factored in, but one that corporate interests such as those McPherson mentions make efforts to conceal or direct attention away from. As Golumbia pointed out last week, corporations are privvy to massive amounts of data about our behaviors online, the same corporations that build interfaces designed to emphasize the 'free' motion of surfing. We are being watched, yes, but it's not always in the form of Web 2.0 user-created content, not volitional exposure, the choice to appear before a gaze, and that fact is something our attention is drawn away from by the self-concealing nature of code.

The bind here is that the very desire to have both privacy and viewership is mirrored in both consumer and corporation. The fear of being watched is tied into the desire to watch without the watched's knowledge. In Foucauldian terms, everyone wants to be inside the Panopticon's watchtower, rather than the cells. This seems like the inverse of the televisible hierarchy of actor/audience, but it's actually the compliment. The key change is a matter of volition and knowledge. The audience and the actor both know about the relationship, and have chosen to take part in it. The surfer and the corporation both wish to watch while unwatched. The choice to be revealed and the knowledge of the gaze produce the shift from being watched as power and being watched powerlessness. So, when we are offered up 'choice' and the 'possibility' of the 'information superhighway', we are being given a sugar coating around our bitter pill; the illusion of volition and the promise of knowledge giving the surfer a sense of power without the power itself.