Dog shit web (or YOU are Big Brother)

Enrique Dans commented on this post in his blog concerning an apparently a minor and far-off event: in a Korean subway train a girl refused to clean up the mess her dog made on the floor. The photos that some of her fellow travelers took with their mobile phones and published in their blogs started a 'lynching' that was virtual at first, but once the girl was identified, turned into actual verbal abuse in the street. The girl was nicknamed, “Dog-shit-girl”.

The same day Nacho Escolar noticed the security cameras that have blossomed in the streets and remembered Bentham's Panopticon. These new gargoyles are performing the same function as the circular prison that he designed where the prisoners never knew if they were being watched at any moment. Nacho quotes Foucault who theorized about how such devices have been adopted by political regimes. The interview with Foucault quoted in his post finishes like this:

M.P.: And does it make sense for the prisoners to choose the central tower?

Foucault: Yes, provided that this is not the end of the matter. Do you not think that the Panopticon would work more effectively with the prisoners installed in the tower rather than the guards?

I think that what he meant by this is that however dangerous the idea of a Panopticon may be, with a minority controlling a majority, how much more dangerous would it be for the majority (or what passes for the majority) to compel conformity and neutralize independent thinking.

The minority of today was the girl with poor community spirit, but tomorrow it could be anyone or anything. Appearances are everything, like in this other “example of dung”: an old friend of mine went to work in Holland for a few months and rented a cottage in the country. One Monday he discovered his car covered with excrement. Someone from the village, far from liberal Amsterdam, suggested to him that this might have happened because he had washed his car (and so performed manual labor) on a Sunday. The pretty twitching Dutch curtains at the windows of his neighbors are today the cameras in the mobile phones of the travelers on the subway.

Other new examples on the Internet: Moshzilla and Star Wars Kid. Cases of what could be called “photoshop terrorism”, but why not global bullying: these are kids tormented by others, insulted, ridiculed, given nicknames and their images defaced... Like at school, but on the Internet. “Star Wars Kid” or Ghyslain gave up college to go to a child psychiatrist according to the claim by his parents. The parents of “Moshilla” or Sammy also threatened legal action and she said in an interview, “in a nutshell, I feel shitty”. Behind these images on the Internet are real people.

I hope that the global village described by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s will not turn out to be as provincial and oppressive, although I fear that he already warned us about it as a side effect of the era of "electronic interdependence”:

And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

At the moment we are conscious of this dynamic, although its signs are still small. On the same topic, I believe that the debate about privacy is important. Not so much for the observed as for the observer and commentator. It has been proved that the larger the tribe and the greater the anonymity, the more frequent and cruel are the 'lynchings'. The Internet is so large and so anonymous... As regards the observed, taking away privacy results in conformity. This is not only a theory but put into practice in politics and demonstrated by social psychology. As is the bystander effect that killed Kitty Genovese . Will the presence of security cameras one day dissuade us from helping someone in a similar situation in the future?