Annotation Mash Up

Foucault’s text on “The Means of Correct Training” focus on the methods and techniques implemented by the disciplinary society. He uses education as his prime example, outlining how the society mold and shapes individuals using observations, training, and punishment. Discipline is used to create, or make the individuals in the shape which best fits the controlling society. Individuals are regarded as both objects, and as instruments to serve as tools for the society. The techniques implemented by the society for molding these individuals was hierarchical observation, normalising judgement, disciplinary punishment, honorary classification, examination, and documentation. Students and Individuals are regarded as both objects, and as instruments to serve as tools for the society. We see this structure of control in the white bear and in waldo of the black mirror. In both of these stories, the protagonist is a media object. In the case of Waldo, a cartoon who attempts to pose as an opposition to the political overhead, we see his character dismantled and implemented by the “control society” to push their political agenda. He goes from being a puppet controlled by a comedian to one that is controlled by the political power, while still wearing the mask of a light hearted comedian with a more subversive agenda. The white bear is a darker side of the techniques of control, normalised judgement, and punishment. The story follows a distraught woman who seems to have awaken in a society she is not familure with; one that has been over run by the media symbol which has transformed people into violent , camera wielding zombies. The final twist is that they are all an audience to this woman’s disturbing punishment orchestrated by the government, and unknowingly performed by her. It turns out that these camera wielding people are visitors to a park which was established for perpetually placing this woman in a cycle of abuse and fear, at the end of which, it is always revealed to her that she is a prisoner being run through a maze of horror as punishment for her role in the abudction, abuse, and murder of a child. Her abuse is turned into a spectacle, and the cruelty of the exercise becomes normal, accepted, and a form of entertainment. Another example where we see the tools of surveillance and observation is with How Little We Know About our neighbours. This documentary outlines the development of Britain’s Ethnographic Survey, which was proposed to understand the current state of England and its people. This came about during a trend of mass observation, and The government hired people to sit around all day, and making notes about what people did, how they did them, where they did them. Every detail was noted from afar, and those being observed were unaware. This group consisted of a number of men, called observers, and a number of photographers. They intended to track people for the purpose of understanding why Britain was in a social slump, with the hopes of understanding how the objects in their lives were connected to this repressive situation. They hoped that the camera would document the collective unconscious of the people, and of the society that which could not be seen with the human eye”. These ‘observers’ were intended to fade into the background, as not to influence what it is that they observed. 

In another example which focuses less on the “big brother” type of government surveillance, is “We Live in Public”, a documentary about the artists and tech mogul who experiments on himself and friends as a way of making a prediction about what the presence of the internet will do to our lives, and to the way we live them. We live in public: focuses on the life of Josh Harris and his contributions to the tech industry in the early 90s. Essentially, with his ‘experiments’, he predicts the way in which we will all hand ourselves over to the public (the web) in the future. Josh predicted that the existence of the web would create a fundamental change in the human condition. The mode of representation was going to change, and Josh wrapped his arms around that possibility. His first major experiment came after his financial success in the tech industry. He used his profits to create an experiment called “Quite”. In Quite, Josh was “ in the business of programming peoples lives”. He offered them a place to eat, and sleep, and stated "Everything is free, but the video we own”. As with Foucalt, an important part of this experiment is documentation. All that is observed is recorded.   Within Quite, he is the operator, and has total control over his “lab rats”. After a few months of the experiment, “things became aggressively weird“, and we see him become a kind of an evil puppet master who is waiting for the whole thing to fall apart.  Despite the dissolution of Quite, Josh had given himself over freely to the idea of surveillance, and takes his experiments one step further with “We Live In Public”.  The cameras are turned on him and his relationship, and he broadcasts his life onto the web 24/7. After the initial excitement of sublet fame, Josh begins to feel like the puppet himself, and his audience has become audience and director.  Before Josh began “Quite”, he predicted that “we will all wake up servants one day”. In his case, after he made his life public, not only has he become a servant, but the function of his relationship was no longer for love, or togetherness, but for the purpose of serving the audience. Instead of being open to the world, and connecting to the many, they both became alienated by that total openness, and became completely isolated from their public, and from one another.  This, which was seemingly a failure, ruined his reputation, and the politics of this new ‘web’ went along with out his input, or his ironical criticisms.  The example of Josh’s work with surveillance is a very interesting example, in that he uses himself as the guine pig.