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the merging of the surveillance state and
SELFIE CULTURE
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
In
a society based so largely
on illusions and appearances,
the ultime illusions, art and religion,
have no future.
Chistopher Lasch
Surveillance
has become a growing feature of daily life wielded by both the
state and the larger corporate sphere. This merger registers
both the transformation of the political state into the corporate
state as well as the transformation of a market economy into
a criminal economy. One growing attribute of the merging of
state and corporate surveillance apparatuses is the increasing
view of privacy on the part of the American public as something
to escape from rather than preserve as a precious political
right. The surveillance and security-corporate state is one
that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of
information through data mining necessary for monitoring the
American public -- now considered as both potential terrorists
and a vast consumer market -- but also acculturates the public
into accepting the intrusion of surveillance technologies and
privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives.
Personal information is willingly given over to social media
and other corporate based websites such as Instagram, Facebook,
MySpace and other media platforms and harvested daily as people
move from one targeted website to the next across multiple screens
and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “social
media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably
for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,” all
the while endlessly shopping online and texting. While selfies
may not lend themselves directly to giving up important private
information online, they do speak to the necessity to make the
self into an object of public concern, if not a manifestation
of how an infatuation with selfie culture now replaces any notion
of the social as the only form of agency available to many people.
Under such circumstances, it becomes much easier to put privacy
rights at risk as they are viewed less as something to protect
than to escape from in order to put the self on public display.
When
the issue of surveillance takes place outside of the illegal
practices performed by government intelligence agencies, critics
most often point to the growing culture of inspection and monitoring
that occurs in a variety of public spheres through ever present
digital technologies used in the collecting of a mass of diverse
information, most evident in the use video cameras that inhabit
every public space from the streets, commercial establishments,
and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as
in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports,
stores, sporting events, and the like. Rarely do critics point
to the emergence of the selfie as another index of the public’s
need to escape from the domain of what was once considered to
be the cherished and protected realm of the private and personal.
Privacy rights in this instance that were once viewed as a crucial
safeguard in preventing personal and important information from
being inserted into the larger public domain. In the present
oversaturated information age, the right to privacy has gone
the way of an historical relic and for too many Americans privacy
is no longer a freedom to be cherished and by necessity to be
protected. In fact, young people, in particular, cannot escape
from the realm of the private fast enough. The rise of the selfie
offers one index of this retreat from privacy rights and thus
another form of legitimation for devaluing these once guarded
rights altogether. One place to begin is with the increasing
presence of the selfie, that is, the ubiquity of self-portraits
being endlessly posted on various social media. One recent commentary
on the selfie reports that:
A
search on photo sharing app Instagram retrieves over 23 million
photos uploaded with the hashtag #selfie, and a whopping 51
million with the hashtag #me. Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga
and Madonna are all serial uploaders of selfies. Model Kelly
Brook took so many she ended up “banning” herself.
The Obama children were spotted posing into their mobile phones
at their father’s second inauguration. Even astronaut
Steve Robinson took a photo of himself during his repair of
the Space Shuttle Discovery. Selfie-ism is everywhere. The word
“selfie” has been bandied about so much in the past
six months it’s currently being monitored for inclusion
in the Oxford Dictionary Online.
What
this new politics of digital self-representation suggests is
that the most important transgression against privacy may not
only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening
and collecting of information by the state. What is also taking
place through the interface of state and corporate modes of
the mass collecting of personal information is the practice
of normalizing surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient
and enticements for young people and older consumers. These
groups are now constantly urged to use the new digital technologies
and social networks as a mode of entertainment and communication.
Yet, they function largely to simulate false notions of community
and to socialize young people into a regime of security and
commodification in which their identities, values and desires
are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help
and consuming.
The
more general critique of selfies points to their affirmation
as an out of control form of vanity and narcissism in a society
in which an unchecked capitalism promotes forms of rampant self-interests
that both legitimize selfishness and corrode individual and
moral character. In this view, a market driven moral economy
of increased individualism and selfishness has supplanted any
larger notion of caring, social responsibility and the public
good. For example, one indication that Foucault’s notion
of self-care has now moved into the realm of self-obsession
can be seen in the “growing number of people who are waiting
in line to see plastic surgeons to enhance images they post
of themselves on smartphones and other social media sites. Patricia
Reaney points out that “Plastic surgeons in the United
States have seen a surge in demand for procedures ranging from
eye-lid lifts to rhinoplasty, popularly known as nose job, from
patients seeking to improve their image in selfies and on social
media.” It appears that selfies are not only an indication
of the public’s descent into the narrow orbits of self-obsession
and individual posturing but also good for the economy, especially
plastic surgeons who generally occupy the one percent of the
upper class of rich elites. The unchecked rise of selfishness
is now partly driven by the search for new forms of capital,
which recognize no boundaries and appear to have no ethical
limitations.
In
a society in which the personal is the only politics, there
is more at stake in selfie culture than rampant narcissism or
the swindle of fulfillment offered to teenagers and others whose
self-obsession and insecurity takes an extreme, if not sometimes
dangerous, turn. What is being sacrificed is not just the right
to privacy, the willingness to give up the self to commercial
interests, but the very notion of individual and political freedom.
The atomization that in part promotes the popularity of selfie
culture is not only nourished by neoliberal fervor for unbridled
individualism, but also by the weakening of public values and
the emptying out of collective and engaged politics. The political
and corporate surveillance state is not just concerned about
promoting the flight from privacy rights but also attempts to
use that power to canvass every aspect of one’s life in
order to suppress dissent, instill fear in the populace, and
repress the possibilities of mass resistance against unchecked
power. Selfie culture is also fed by a spiritually empty consumer
culture driven by a never-ending “conditions of visibility…in
which a state of permanent illumination (and performance) is
inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and
circulation.” Jonathan Crary’s insistence that entrepreneurial
excess now drives a 24/7 culture points rightly to a society
driven by a constant state of “producing, consuming, and
discarding” -- a central feature of selfie culture.
Once
again, too many young people today seem to run from privacy
by making every aspect of their lives public. Or they limit
their presence in the public sphere to posting endless images
of themselves. In this instance, community becomes reduced to
the sharing of a nonstop production of images in which the self
becomes the only source of agency worth validating. At the same
time, the popularity of selfies points beyond an over indulgent
narcissism, or a desire to collapse the public spheres into
endless and shameless representations of the self. Selfies and
the culture they produce cannot be entirely collapsed into the
logic of domination. Hence, I don’t want to suggest that
selfie culture is only a medium for various forms of narcissistic
performance. Some commentators have suggested that selfies enable
people to reach out to each other, present themselves in positive
ways, and use selfies to drive social change. And there are
many instances of this type of behaviour.
Many
young people claim that selfies offer the opportunity to invite
comments by friends, raise their self-esteem, and offer a chance
for those who are powerless and voiceless to represent themselves
in a more favourable and instructive light. For instance, Rachel
Simmons makes a valiant attempt to argue that selfies are especially
good for girls. While this is partly true, I think Erin Gloria
Ryan is right in responding to Simmons claim about selfies as
a “positive-self-esteem builder” when she states:
“Stop this. Selfies aren’t empowering; they’re
a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches
women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”
It is difficult to believe that mainstream, corporate saturated
selfie culture functions to mostly build self-esteem among young
girls who are a target for being reduced to salacious sexual
commodities and a never-ending market that defines them largely
as tidbits of a sensationalized celebrity culture. What is often
missing in the marginalized use of selfies is that for the most
part the practice is driven by a powerful and pervasive set
of poisonous market driven values that frame this practice in
ways that are often not talked about. Selfie culture is now
a part of a market driven economy that encourages selfies as
an act of privatization and consumption not as a practice that
might support the public good.
What
is missing from this often romanticized and depoliticized view
of the popularity of selfies is that the mass acceptance, proliferation
and commercial appropriation of selfies suggests that the growing
practice of producing representations that once filled the public
space that focused on important social problems and a sense
of social responsibility are in decline among the American public,
especially many young people whose identities and sense of agency
is now shaped largely through the lens of a highly commodified
and celebrity culture. We now live in a market-driven age defined
as heroic by the conservative Ayn Rand, who argued in her book,
The Virtue of Selfishness, that self-interest was the
highest virtue and that altruism deserved nothing more than
contempt. This retreat from the public good, compassion, care
for the other, and the legitimation of a culture of cruelty
and moral indifference is often registered in strange signposts
and popularized in the larger culture. For instance, one expression
of this new celebrity fed stupidity can be seen less in the
endless prattle about the importance of selfies than in the
rampant posturing inherent in selfie culture most evident in
the widely marketed fanfare over Kim Kardashian’s appropriately
named book, Selfish, which contains, of course, hundreds
of her selfies. As Mark Fisher points out, this suggests a growing
testimony to a commodified society in which “in a world
of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings,
trapped within their own imaginations…and unable to escape
the tortured conditions of solipsism.”
Under
the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not
simply the violation of one’s right to privacy, but the
fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary
power it no longer seems interested in contesting. And it is
precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture
of political indifference that puts at risk the broader principles
of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself.
According to Skinner:
The
response of those who are worried about surveillance has so
far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation
of the right to privacy. Of course it’s true that my privacy
has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my
knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated,
and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails
but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should
they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away
liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power.
It’s no use those who have possession of this power promising
that they won’t necessarily use it, or will use it only
for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very
existence of such arbitrary power.
The
rise of selfies under the surveillance state is only one register
of neoliberal inspired flight from privacy. As I have argued
elsewhere, the dangers of the surveillance state far exceed
the attack on privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing
security against civil liberties. The critique of the flight
from privacy fails to address how the growth of the surveillance
state and its appropriation of all spheres of private life are
connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization
of American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture,
a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social
problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of
the largest prison systems in the world, all of which “are
only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse
security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted.”
The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance
apparatus and security system with its “urge to surveill,
eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication
of any sort on the planet” can only be fully understood
when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures
of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors
of public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization
of local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic
complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of
terrorism in the U.S. Selfies may be more than an expression
of narcissism gone wild, the promotion of privatization over
preserving public and civic culture with their attendant practice
of social responsibility. They may also represent the degree
to which the ideological and affective spaces of neoliberalism
have turned privacy into a mimicry of celebrity culture that
both abets and is indifferent to the growing surveillance state
and its totalitarian revolution, one that will definitely be
televised in an endlessly repeating selfie that owes homage
to George Orwell.
COMMENTS
jbutler@ucn.ca
I agree one hundred percent. As someone who does not use social
media (including smart phones)I see selfies as not just narcissistic
but as a voluntary relinquishing of any private identity that
is left after the surveillance people are finished. And in
the end, who cares what you look like or who you're posing
with? Since privacy is being eroded anyway, why not help by
surveilling oneself? The sheep are following without even
being directly led! How convenient for the shepherds, who
don't even have to work any more.
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