#twowaymirror

Microsoft Teams as a Panoptican Dystopia. 

What would Dan Graham and Jeremy Bentham have thought of virtual meetings?

I was reading an article on the bbc entitled ‘why zoom video chats are so exhausting?’ the article likened a zoom meeting to an anthropomorphised tv, saying:

‘Big group calls can feel particularly performative, Petriglieri warns. People like watching television because you can allow your mind to wander – but a large video call “is like you're watching television and television is watching you”. Large group chats can also feel depersonalising, he adds, because your power as an individual is diminished”

The article reminded me of the work of Dan Graham and his use of the cameras and tv in his artwork. His work was made at a time when tvs and screens were becoming progressively more familiar and available. It could be suggested that the work was a comment on the increasingly panoptican nature of society.  The relevance of the phrase 

‘power as an individual is diminished’

seems to me a reference to the totalitarium Panoptican prison system put forward by Jeremy Bentham. “

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched”.

Through surveillance prisoners/society can be controlled and docile. 

My experience of our tutor group meeting for uni, reminded me of a Bentham approach (ironic as being a UCL meeting) . The performative nature of presenting when you cannot see the reactions of your audience, and the not knowing whether you are being observed while engaging in the meeting. The silence of the viewers gaze and the lack of control of your response reminded me of the work of Dan Graham where he plays with the act of looking, switching the gaze of the viewer and the performer/artist constantly.  Dan Grahams work uses one way mirror as a reference to surveillance. We are increasingly living in a world that our lives are being observed. We are the performers. 

Of the telescreens in the landmark surveillance narrative Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised” Microsoft teams means that you never know when it is your image displayed to the group. 

Imagine if the microsoft teams approach was taken on in the future of education.... We truly are entering into a society with an increasingly Orwellian nature to its landscape.