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European Visions for the Knowledge Age |
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European Visions for the Knowledge Age
A Quest for New Horizons in
the Information Society
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- Paul T Kidd (Ed)
- ISBN 978-1-901864-08-3 (Paperback)
- Price: See buy
on-line link
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- Chapter 7
- Variations on Big Brother
- Walter Van de Velde
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- Introduction - Big Brother
Visions
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- Big Brother visions have well-known
roots in literature, with Orwell (1984), Kafka (Das Schloss)
and Kubrick's HAL (2001 A Space Odyssey) as primary pointers.
The idea is also present in religion. Many will remember the
Christian icon of an eye, with the inscription "God sees
everything". The post-modern God of television has adapted
the idea of Big Brother with similarly strong impact.
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- This small sample shows that
no two Big Brothers are the same. The Big Brother in Das Schloss
is an invisible bureaucracy that derives its power from its absurdity.
Orwell's is an omnipresent observer that perpetuates an established
order. Kubrick's Big Brother is willing to destroy the order
to preserve itself. All inspire awe, and stimulate obeisance
and subordination. In the Big Brother television series, on the
other hand, the eye becomes public. It stimulates spectacle and
trespassing of social norms, not obeisance.
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- Big Brother visions are usually
distopian. They restrict privacy and freedom to the presumed
benefit of some higher good, explicit or not. Their strength
is in the subtle psychological nature of that restriction. They
constrain without use of physical force, that is to say, by bending
the mind rather than the body through reason or other means.
This is well illustrated in Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon
prison, an architectural realisation of an omnipotent observer
that cannot be seen.
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- Big Brothers are not just
fiction. The internet, for one, has been analysed as a digital
panopticon. Digital transactions, from looking at web pages to
buying online, leave their traces. It is technically possible
to understand the digital trace of someone's life by piecing
together information that is dispersed in various databases,
routers and servers. Businesses and governments alike are tempted
by the wealth of information that this can provide.
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- Technology has always been
a driver for this type of surveillance. Closed-circuit television-camera
security-systems, web cams, geographic positioning systems, image
analysis, and environmental monitoring are all potential Big
Brother technologies. One example of the power brought about
by these technologies is the plan for the London Underground
system to have 9000 cameras by 2005, with specialised image analysis
software to detect suspicious behaviours. Ambient intelligence
systems can also be seen in the same light, with computing devices
embedded in everyday objects, responding in an unseen way to
the presence of people to anticipate their needs. This blurs
the boundary of the locus of initiative and thus easily drifts
from service to soft coercion.
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- Surveillance systems are usually
set up for specific occasions, but then have a tendency to stay.
An increasing demand for more security from citizens is interpreted
often as a demand for more control and surveillance. To allow
authorities to track down the suspicious few, entire populations
are sacrificing privacy and freedom to make sure that they fit
safely within the norms.
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- Do Big Brothers necessarily
restrict privacy and freedom? Or can something else be done with
them, now or in the future? To answer these questions two scenarios,
set in the distant future, are considered: Connectopolis and
Egopoli. Connectopolis describes the experiences and impressions
of a visitor from Egopoli, and Egopoli the experiences and impressions
of a visitor from Connectopolis.
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