Did Foucault prematurely announce the end of confinement? It sure looks like it when looking at the US, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. According to government statistics, the number of people in prison and jail is outpacing the number of inmates released, even while the crime rate continues to fall. By June 2004 there were 2.1 million people in US jails, or one in every 138 residents (ref, ref). Race has everything to do with this issue: “blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested… and 49 percent of those in prison… One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995.” (ref).

And that’s just at home. The US is also in the business of confining people abroad. According to the article American Gulag in Harper’s Sept. 2006 issue, 450 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, approximately 13,000 in Iraq, 500 in Afghanistan, and an estimated 100 in secret CIA “black sites” around the world. They have not been formally charged, and have little legal recourse. In essence, they are guilty until the US decides they are innocent. While the man in charge of the facility “firmly believes” that there are no innocent men in Guantanamo, a report based on data from the Dept. of Defense indicates that 55% of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its allies (ref, ref). According to Harper’s, 98 Guantanamo detainees have died to date, it is safe to assume not from natural causes.

But it’s not simply the case that this society is a bit behind in the transition from discipline to control. It is actually advancing equally well on both fronts. In fact, increased control goes hand in hand with increased confinement because increased control means more precise ways of identifying those who fail to perform to society’s expectations. In a technocracy, control is surveillance: the continuous monitoring of public, private and work life, and the “intelligent” identification of any deviance. But while new control technologies afford more effective and efficient methods of management and surveillance, you still need an apparatus for controlling those who fall outside the established parameters. This group includes those who have failed in the educational system and therefore cannot productively contribute to the service economy, enemies of the state (preemptively defined), non-conforming minorities, etc. (I’m not suggesting there are no criminals in prison; I’m merely drawing some conclusions from trends in the makeup of the prison population). The trick is then to turn the confinement of these ‘burdens’ of society into a business opportunity by benefiting from their cheap labor or by privatizing the industry of confinement itself (think Halliburton).

I hinted above at the role of education as a control mechanism that helps differentiate the productive members of society from those who should be confined and disciplined. The fact that the same groups who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population are also those most likely to drop out of the educational system is not a coincidence (only about half of Black and Hispanic youth graduate with a high-school degree; ref). But for everyone else who succeeds, what does education look like? The answer is: continuous control. I was struck by Deleuze’s comments regarding the changing nature of education in a control society:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business. (1995, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The constant student is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Thanks to distance education, e-learning and technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS), education becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which —more importantly— can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ career of the individual. Thus, assessment-based education helps reconcile control and discipline in society by helping to effect, in the case of those who fail, a transition from controlled subject to disciplined object.

I want to go back briefly to Deleuze’s comment about control societies also operating through “instant communication” (1995, p. 174, my emphasis). It would make sense to assume that, in a crude way, control societies would want to control communication. But that is not the case. According to the standard technophile discourse, thanks to technology our societies enjoy an unprecedented freedom of speech and expression. Communication technologies with low operational cost and low barriers of entry (such as blogs) are praised for giving “everyone” a chance to express themselves. But Deleuze points out that “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves… What we’re are plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (1995, p. 129). Deleuze is suggesting that there is a connection between control and an over-abundance of (meaningless) expression. More of this type of communication has not resulted in stronger social bonds, but in increased isolation: concurrent with advances in ICTs, the last U.S. census shows that 25% of the nation’s households (27.2 million) consist of just one person, compared to 10% in 1950 (ref).

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

Offline Reference:
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Creative Commons photo credit: thost

The September 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (contents not online, unfortunately) has a piece titled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. It is a conversation between Jane Avrich (author and English teacher), Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Raph Koster (video-game designer, including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies), Thomas De Zengotlta (author, teacher) and moderator Bill Wasik (senior editor of Harper’s).

The participants were asked to discuss how video games could be used to teach literacy. The guys (Jane is allowed to interject here and there) immediately get to the task, envisioning various kinds of possible games for this purpose, including a zombie game where you have to type a word correctly in order to off a Z. But the conversation does include more interesting nuggets. For instance, the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:

KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)

Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation. If anything, it reminds me of certain critiques of technology (such as Rivers’) which argue that our current technosocial systems stamp out individuality and are responsible for the erasure of the individual by the mass. One could argue that appropriation and annotation are the natural forms of a mass literacy, operationalized through the extreme individualism of the blogosphere (masses are not collectives as much as they are homogenous collections of isolated individuals). That resulting kind of democracy, therefore, is one which blocks authentic difference and makes the masses more susceptible to control. And speaking of control, the Harper’s group briefly touches upon the issue of authority:

WASIK: But you’re suggesting that increasingly it’s the social network itself, through reputation systems or what have you, that is acting as the authority?

JOHNSON: This is especially true in the online network games, too, which are really the most influential games in the world right now. Raph, actually, helped to create some of the biggest ones. With Ultima Online and other online games, we’ve had the rise of guild structures, these distributed systems for collaborating. A player who wants to slay a particular dragon will need to get twelve people together, and put one in charge of this, another in charge of at. (p. 37)

The kind of authority described here, however, is very simplistic. It is more interesting to explore the question of how in social media (and networked games) the masses are not susceptible to a central form of authority, but to a distributed form of control emanating from the mass itself, from what are considered to be ‘objective’ rules and values. It’s rationalism all over again, with logical thinking as the only valid method for interpreting the world. At one point, the Harper’s group confronts this problem:

ZENGOTITA: … But when the players go out into the real world, I think there’s a real danger—and I see signs of this in my students, and young people in general—of failing to understand not just the complexity of the real world but also its mystery. I’m using “mystery” as opposed to “problem” on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don’t. People are profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real world involves understanding that you’re never going to entirely understand them.

…

KOSTER: To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a really big mistake. But of course this perspective predates video games. It harkens back to behaviorist psychology, and a variety of unsavory political movements as well.

ZENGOTITA: It’s systems-based thinking, model-based thinking. I can’t claim that Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara were products of video-game education. But they show all the symptoms of it. (p. 35)

Zengotita sets up a dichotomy between problems that have solutions and mysteries that don’t, and points out how the gamist perspective inculcates problem-solving skills but not the skills required to live with the ambiguity of complex ‘mysteries.’ The thing with rationalism is that it inverts the problem-solution relation in such a way that only problems that have solutions it can handle are made relevant. Problems, in other words, are subordinated to solutions. This makes, ultimately, for a very impoverished relationship with reality. As DeLanda (2004) warns: “The crucial task is to avoid the subordination of problems to solutions brought about by the search for simple linear behaviour” (2004, p. 171).

Interestingly, while this threat was identified early in the Harper’s piece, the participants quickly move on to describe more ways in which games can teach literacy. It is as if we are required to surrender our agency in a technocracy, and while we can make observations, we are beyond questioning the progress of technology. So what if video-games produce more Rummi’s?

(Disclaimer: I own a Gameboy)

I’d love to hear from the literacy and gaming people what they think about the Harper’s piece or my reading of it.

References:

De Landa, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London; New York: Continuum.

Creative Commons photo credit: gregoryperez

Because societies and technologies are mutually-determining (they shape one another), we cannot draw a simple cause-effect relationship between technization and civilization. According to Elias, technologies regulate behavior, requiring more civilized conduct, but technologies are produced by humans living in civilizations, so neither technization nor civilization can be said to be the first in the process.

But Elias’ more interesting observation is that “it can indeed be observed that a spurt in technization and a spurt in civilization quite often go hand in hand in societies. [But] It quite often happens that a counter-spurt also occurs at the newly-reached stage of technization, a spurt towards de civilization.” (Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (editors). The Norbert Elias Reader: a biographical selection. 1998: Blackwell Publishers p. 214)

Elias considers the example of the development of motor-vehicle technologies. Nowadays we can all assume, for the most part, that all drivers will adhere to certain civilized behavior (by ‘civilized,’ Elias means a degree of standardization that allows more complex societies to function; he does not mean ‘civilized’ as in ‘nice’) . However, the introduction of this technology did not proceed smoothly. Car accidents and fatalities were much higher (in relation to the number of cars on the road) than today. People got hurt. People abused the new technology. Drivers, passengers, car manufacturers, and civic authorities had to come up with external constraints to correct this ‘uncivilized’ behavior.

The move towards decivilization introduced by new technizations makes me wonder about our experiences with technologies such as the internet. Is the prominent prescence of pornography, or the ease with which people feel they can ‘flame’ others online, or the abandonment to meaningless virtuality, signs of such decivilization?

The following excerpts from Elias are a useful reminder of the opportunities as well as the challenges that we face in the information age:

The advance in technization has brought people all over the globe closer together. But the development of the human habitus is not keeping with the development of technization and its consequences. Technization encourages humankind to move closer together and to unify. The more this happens, the more will the differences in human groups become apparent to human awareness. (ibid, p. 224)

The triumphant advance of the aeroplane [or the internet, for that matter], as a medium for global traffic in peace and war, has decisively contributed to the growing interdependence of all states on the globe and, at the same time, is also its product. It has enormous civilizing influence, by bringing people from all regions closer to each other…. [However,] [n]o group of people is pleased when it realizes that it is now more dependent on others than before. (ibid, p. 225)

This last quote is not really about technization, but I found it very inspirational:

The world in which we live is an emergent world, it is humankind on the move. We obscure our view of the process that we as humankind experience, if instead of accepting the world as it really is, we judge it as if it were an eternally unchanging world… That is what one does when one represents the world as bad or good, as civilized or as barbaric. Humanity is in a great collective learning process… We can see today that the task that lies before us is to work towards the pacification and organized unification of humankind. Let us not be discouraged in this work by the knowledge that this task will not in our lifetime progress to fruition from the experimental period in which it is now. It is certainly worthwhile and highly meaningful to set to work in an unfinished world that will go on beyond oneself. (ibid, pp. 228-229)

Anyone engaged in such research would probably find that our societies are not lacking in diversity. Every ethnicity, ideology, religion and fetish known to humankind is probably represented in cyberspace. But does this diversity translate into more tolerance? Given the general state of affairs in the world, the answer would seem to be resoundingly negative.

Some argue that the conflicts caused by the increased contact of dissimilar people can only be alleviated through more tolerant behavior. Thus, a keystone of modern democracy is that, despite differences of all kinds, citizens should exercise tolerance and agree that the one thing that unites us all is our desire to be governed justly and be treated equally.

On the one hand, I’m interested in exploring if technology can, by increasing the presence of diverse voices and facilitating dialogue, lead to increased understanding and tolerance. On the other hand, I’m also interested in the limits of tolerance as exercised by a society through hybrid mass-public media such as the internet.

Related to the latter line of inquiry, it seems to me that a major obstacle in working towards a genuine understanding of the Other is precisely our modern conceptualization of tolerance and freedom. Richard Hoggart, in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy, described how freedom started to acquire a particularly authoritarian edge in the age of mass communications. Hoggart analyzed how print media served to construct an ‘Anything Goes’ culture in which freedom was attached to materialistic goals and consumption, excluding development of the Self and understanding of the Other in any meaningful way.

“[T]he concept of freedom may widen until it becomes the freedom not to ‘be’ anything at all, and certainly hardly to object to anything at all. A man is free not to choose, but if he uses his freedom to choose so as to be unlike the majority, he is likely to be called ‘narrow-minded’, ‘bigoted’, ‘dogmatic’, ‘intolerant’, ‘a busybody’, ‘undemocratic’… Tolerance becomes not so much a charitable allowance for human frailty and the difficulties of ordinary lives, as a weakness, a ceaseless leaking-away of the will-to-decide on matters outside the immediate touchable orbit.” (p.133)

Pressure to conform, as imposed by this brand of ‘freedom,’ prevents people from defining themselves in any moral way, and any expression of belief that contradicts any other belief results in accusations of hypocrisy or fanaticism. Thus, if one values freedom, it is best to not believe.

“The reasoning seems to be as follows: (1) The only value is freedom; (2) Therefore to have an open mind is the only firm line required; but (3) These people have suggested that some uses of freedom may be wrong; they have taken a moral line; and therefore, (4) They must be hypocrites; they are hiding something; they want freedom for themselves, but not for others. This is the other side of the coin which has ’sincerity’ on its face. If you accept total freedom, but do not advocate any ‘line’ of your own, you may come in for praise because your muddling through indicates that you are ’sincere, anyway’. Suggest a rule and you will attract the full weight of opprobrium for the greatest sin in the new catalogue, ‘hypocrisy’.” (p. 155)

This results in a society in which the very availability of ‘freedom’ weakens our ability to negotiate differences and draw boundaries. Are we better human beings for allowing ourselves to live in a society in which all beliefs, no matter how corrupt or perverted, are tolerated? Hoggart argues that real tolerance comes at a high cost.

“The tolerance of men [sic] who have some strength and are prepared, if necessary, to use it, is a meaningful tolerance; the tolerance of those whose muscles are flabby and spirits unwilling is simply a ‘don’t-hit-me’ masquerading as mature agreement. Genuine tolerance is a product of vigour, belief, a sense of the difficulty of truth and a respect for others; the new tolerance is weak and unwilling, a fear and resentment of challenge.” (p.134)

Finally, it is interesting to note how for Hoggart, centralization and technology went hand in hand as far as imposing this new ‘freedom.’ People in a mass society find freedom in the consumption of newer technologies, and the sense of belonging that they afford. However, although these technologies advertise new freedoms of expression and assembly, they may come at the cost of other freedoms in ways we may not have yet become fully aware of.

[T]he problem is acute and pressing–how that freedom may be kept as in any sense a meaningful thing whilst the processes of centralisation and technological development continue. This is a particularly intricate challenge because, even if substantial inner freedom were lost, the great new classless class would be unlikely to know it: its members would still regard themselves as free and be told that they were free.” (p.268)

Freedoms gained and exercised exclusively in virtuality fit totalitarian interests like a glove.

Pierre Flourens, a French physician living in the times of Victor Hugo, wrote the following about the effects of anaesthetics:

“I still cannot bring myself to assent to the use of chloroform in general surgical practice. As you may know, I have devoted extensive study to this drug and as a result of animal experiments have been one of the first to describe its specific characteristics. My scruples are based on the simple fact that operations under chloroform, and probably also under the other known forms of narcosis, amount to a deception. The agents act only on certain motor and coordination centers and on the residual capacity of the nerve substance. Under the influence of chloroform it loses a significant part of its ability to record traces of impressions but not the capacity for feeling as such. On the contrary, my observations indicate that in conjunction with a general paralysis of innervation, pain is felt still more keenly than in the normal state. The deception of the public results from the inability of the patient to remember the events once the operation is completed. If we told our patients the truth, it is likely that none of them would opt for the drug, whereas now, as a result of our silence, they generally insist on its use.”

The above was quoted by Horkheimer and Adorno in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002). In the context of the mindset that the Enlightenment made possible, they liken our willingness to “tune out” during painful operations to our need to “tune out” during the infliction of pain and destruction upon others and nature:

“[O]ur attitude toward human beings, and toward all creatures, is no different to that toward ourselves after a successful operation: blindness to torment. For cognition, the space separating us from others would mean the same thing as the time between us and the suffering in our own past: an insurmountable barrier… [T]he perennial dominion over nature, medical and nonmedical technology, derives its strength from such blindness; it would be made possible only by oblivion. Loss of memory as the transcendental condition of science.”(pp. 190-191)

Langdon Winner referred to this same phenomenon as technology giving us a license to forget. (Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, MIT Press, 1977). Is this forgetting too high a price to pay? Owning up to the suffering created by our actions and lifestyles is a responsibility that we will abdicate only at the cost of our own humanity. For, as history shows, dissassociating seemingly moral ends from the immoral means employed to achieve those ends has only brought more horrific technologies of destruction, applied by our “leaders” with more and more impunity, and with increasing consent from numb, apathetic masses.