Private vs. Public Self: Violation of the Self
With improvements in technology, William Bogard’s “Welcome to the Society of Control: The Simulation of Surveillance Revisited” claims that there is a proliferation of hyper-realities, implying the increasing inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Such a phenomenon indicates the ambiguity that can occur between self in reality and self in the virtual, especially when considering that the virtual self is the actualized version of your desired self.
Surveillance techniques and strategies have experienced an associative growth alongside the natural expansion of technology. Prompted by the desire to keep a check on and monitor that growth, external forces have evolved and their power to control has extended, which consequently limits the self. First there is the breakdown of traditional and physical surveillance, then, “…new forms of control are emerging that are…destratified,” (59, Bogard). He continues to state that, “what is at stake in the emergence of the society of control is an exceptionally complicated redeployment of global relations of affect and identity” (76, Bogard). As the ability to maintain this privately expressed self in under attack, people are challenged to redefine what version of their self they wish to convey and how to do so. Spector is popular software that records and monitors Internet usage. Not only is this constant monitoring a blatant encroachment of privacy, influencing a person’s natural activity, but it malfunctions and its filters “fail to filter out all the bad stuff, and they prevent users from doing completely legitimate tasks by producing far too many false positives” (56, Bogard). There is a breakdown and failure of technology, which then proceeded to further restrict the self.
Differing from this private software attempting to survey people’s use of the Internet and technology, the US Defense Department planned to create a “virtual, centralized grand database” (57, Bogard) to thwart terrorists enhance homeland security entitled, Total Information Awareness (TIA). This motion was spearheaded by John Poindexter who became the head of “Information Awareness Office, ” which attempted to form a massive “data-mining power to snoop on every public and private act of every American” (57, Bogard). Such wide-scale and ambitious proposals jeopardizes basic human rights and freedoms, yet even “Poindexter’s assault on individual privacy rides roughshod” (58, Bogard) over the U.S.A. Patriot Act which “widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts” (58, Bogard). In this case the government has demonstrated the horror of technology and the ease at which it can be abused and misused. In fact, Congress recently passed the Freedom Act, ending the Patriot Act.