{"id":16866,"date":"2016-01-24T18:22:02","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16866"},"modified":"2016-01-24T18:22:02","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:22:02","slug":"why-do-we-expose-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16866","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Expose Ourselves?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WHY DO WE EXPOSE OURSELVES?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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AMONG CRITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of clich\u00e9. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwell\u2019s Big Brother, from\u00a01984<\/em>. The other is Michel Foucault\u2019s panopticon \u2014 a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which captives cannot tell if or when they are being watched. Today, both of these touchstones are considered chillingly prophetic. But in\u00a0Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age<\/a><\/em>, Bernard Harcourt has another suggestion: Both of them are insufficient.<\/p>\n

1984<\/em>, Harcourt acknowledges, was an astoundingly farsighted text, but Orwell failed to anticipate the role pleasure would come to play in our culture of surveillance \u2014\u00a0specifically, the way it could be harnessed, as opposed to suppressed, by powerful interests. Oceania\u2019s \u201cHate Week\u201d is nowhere to be found; instead, we live in a world of likes, favorites, and friending. Foucault\u2019s panopticon, in turn, needs a similar update; mass incarceration aside, the panopticon \u2014 for the rest of us \u2014 has become participatory, more of an amusement park or shopping mall than a penal institution. Rather than being coerced to reveal secrets, today we seem to enjoy self-exposure, giving away \u201cour most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately \u2014 so voluntarily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exposed\u00a0<\/em>is a welcome addition to the current spate of books about technology and surveillance. While it covers familiar ground \u2014 it opens with brief accounts of Facebook\u2019s methods of tracking users, USAID\u2019s establishment of ZunZuneo (a Twitter-like social network) in Cuba, and Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations of the NSA\u2019s PRISM program \u2014 Harcourt\u2019s contribution is uniquely indebted to critical theory. Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment \u201cPostscript on the Societies of Control,\u201d Harcourt settles upon the phrase \u201cExpository Society\u201d to describe our current situation, one in which we \u201chave become dulled to the perils of digital transparence\u201d and enamored of exposure.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHY DO WE EXPOSE OURSELVES? AMONG CRITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of clich\u00e9. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwell\u2019s Big Brother, from\u00a01984. The other is Michel Foucault\u2019s panopticon \u2014 a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1212,11926,2472,11927,1211,4543,765],"class_list":["post-16866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-1212","tag-astra-taylor","tag-big-brother","tag-culture-of-surveillance","tag-george-orwell","tag-intercept","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16867,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16866\/revisions\/16867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}