Nicholas C. Burbules, Privacy, Surveillance, and Classroom Communication on the Internet
As classrooms enter the digital age, two broad trends come into contact with one another: the capacity of computer networks to record and survey personal information, and the long tradition of schools to examine and discipline students 'for their own sake'.
I. What kind of privacy have students ever had? What circumscribed notion of 'privacy' are we trying to protect, and is protecting it - that is, maintaining its boundaries from further encroachment - also, ironically, a way of maintaining its boundaries from further expansion?
II. The basic idea of the panopticon is straightforward: a central tower or structure has windows on all sides, and it is in turn surrounded by a ring of cells occupied by the inmates, the open sides facing inward. Observers can look out in any direction, at any time, to see what any inmate might be doing.
What this discussion shows is that restrictions on 'privacy' are often consensual in the sense that people give up certain degrees of freedom for the sake of protections that they believe preserve or enhance other freedoms. What is not seen is that this apparent tradeoff commits society to a basic dynamic that inevitably means a gradual diminishment of freedom and privacy in any sense at all.
the very same devices that allow the creation, exploration, and sharing of new knowledge and information, that spark new possibilities of action and interaction, also facilitate a heightened degree of observation and record-keeping about what people actually do.
III. Baudrillard argues that today we already inhabit a world constituted by simulations (through new virtual technologies, through the media, through the representations of advertising, and so forth), so that the spaces ('public' or 'private') that we occupy are already constructed as imaginaries; they are to a large extent defined for us by cultural circumstances that we do not choose, that we can hardly see beyond, since they predominantly define the horizons of our understanding.
IV. the boundary of 'public' versus 'private' spheres generally that such concerns rest upon does not exist: in a panoptic society, students and the rest of us carry with us, in our own identities, the tacit restrictions, the categories, the very sense of being observed (examined, tested, surveyed, polled, modelled, predicted) before we act or choose. So what does 'protecting privacy' mean any longer?
in deciding itself what will constitute use and misuse, the state cannot readily recognize when its own (possibly well-intended) conduct may be a species of misuse.
privacy needs to be thought of not as a sphere, certainly not as a 'protected' sphere (protected by whom?), but as an outcome of a process of struggle and resistance. The instance of student communication in schools, including the use of digital technologies, I have suggested, help to reveal three general ways in which this resistance might be manifested: (1) by contestation of the self-defined restrictions that the state does impose upon itself; (2) by the maintenance of a scope of unauthorized privacy that circumvents, to the extent possible, the well-intentioned limits and 'protections' that state authorities seek to impose; and (3) by silence, by withholding trust in certain cases, refusing whenever possible to provide information that can be used for the ordinary business of record-keeping, categorizing, modelling, prediction, profiling, and intervention into the choices and decisions, not only of one's self, but of unwilling others. In this, as in many other respects, students may have something to teach the rest of us.
Questions for discussion:
- What examples of the panopticon have you seen in recent literature or film?
- How does the panopticon operate for university students?
- Is resistance futile?
- How can protecting privacy also prevent its expansion? (Think of the purposes of webcams; the CIPA)
- How can one person's increase in privacy decrease another's?
- What does it mean to say that privacy is not a sphere, but the outcome of a struggle?
- What questions do you have?