I use what’s called a nanny cam to make sure my toddler stays in bed all night. It allows me to pull him up on my phone to see that he’s jumping on the bed, tossing his books all over the floor, abandoned his covers and blankets to build a tower with his blocks, or even found the audacity to leave his bedroom altogether. It’s very handy, but at times I’ll check in and see the little guy just staring straight into the camera from across the room. I wonder what he thinks about when he stares at the all-seeing camera. Is he bothered that I can keep such a close eye on him? Is he trying to find a way to see me just as I can see him?
Or does he just like the little red light underneath the lens?
Let’s segue.
This unsettling, creepy crawly sensation that comes with the concept of constant monitoring is not new. Many jokingly refer to George Orwell’s 1984 and say “Big Brother” whenever the conversation topic turns to this whole the government knows what you’re up to idea. But George Orwell was not the first to explore the psychological effects of constant observation.
If you’ve never heard of the Panopticon, keep reading. It’s creepy and cool.
At the end of the 18th century, a guy named Jeremy Bentham came up with this idea called the Panopticon. In a nutshell, The Panopticon behavior control theory meets architectural design. Originally designed for prisons, the layout of this building allows for one security guard to monitor, or rather give the impression he’s monitoring, all prisoners at one time. It consists of a large circle of cells, offices, units, etc, surrounding a nucleus in which stands an inspection house.
Here’s the key. You have a guard in the inspection house. It’s clear to all the prisoners that the guard can see them, but the inspection house is shaded so that the prisoners are never sure when or if the guard is looking at them at any given moment in time. Bentham’s theory was that this would encourage positive behavior.
Could an all-seeing eye, successfully manned by a single person, increase positive behavior on the individual level through the entire prison?
But Bentham’s didn’t care to limit his panopticon idea solely to prisons. He thought the same design would work effectively in asylums, factories, hospitals, schools… any institution in which monitoring everyone easily would have a theoretically positive organizational effect.
Sound like psychological torture? You’re not wrong. And Bentham knew it.
Because of concerns about misusing the power of such a design, Bentham believed that ensuring the inspector at the center of the design was publicly accountable was of the utmost importance. A panopticon for the panopticon, one might say.
The design was not broadly received outside of prison design, but many English prisons were built based on Bentham’s ideas. The British government was particularly interested in using the positive behavioral changes to effect greater labor efforts out of the prisoners. A prison was built trying out Bentham’s ideas called Millbank prison, but the design did not produce the desired effects of greater valuable labor. If anything, Bentham’s designs were the source of blame when officials saw an increase of mental illness among prisoners. It turns out feeling like someone is looking over your shoulder all the time does not in fact increase productivity in the long-term.
Shocker.
It should be noted that there was nothing nefarious about Bentham’s design. He did not have a goal to make prisoners’ lives worse. If anything, he theorized that conditions would improve through his system enough to improve rehabilitation. It should be noted, for example, that Bentham’s designs didn’t even encourage locked cell doors, or even cell doors at all. He was that confident that his surveillance was more humane than locking men in cages.
It’s possible that Cuba had the best attempt at a functional panopticon prison built a century after Bentham’s death. The Presidio Modelo, famous for housing Fidel Castro, was true enough to Bentham’s designs that cells had no doors. However, overcrowding, lack of funding, and an inconsistent commitment to rehabilitative principles (cough like maintaining livable conditions cough) ultimately failed to create the positive effects Bentham envisioned.
I’ll be frank: I would hate living in such a condition. And yet, the benefits of observing and measuring performance are indisputable. People hire personal trainers to get after them during workouts. We hire mentors and teachers to watch when we are learning something new and correct us as we go along. This constant observation, when desired by the subject, can have significant positive effects. And yet, as soon as surveillance is not consensual, even tacitly consensual, I believe it increases anxiety and stress.
So does my toddler consent to being watched by his nanny cam all night? Who knows? Maybe he’s too busy sneaking out of his room to care.
