Playing in the Panopticon

Playing in the panopticon addresses the subjects of surveillance and social media, and how these can affect children. Long before I started doing any scholarly research, these were issues I had been dealing with for some years in raising my children. The choice to focus on Facebook was drawn from very recent personal experience with my 22-year-old son who has consistently refused to ‘friend’ me on Facebook – until he went overseas.

Two of my children (aged 18 & 20) agreed to be interviewed to give their perspective on privacy on Facebook.  Fortunately for me, I was provided with soundtrack material by my son who agreed to let me use an audio file of him playing his guitar. Artwork is my own work. One of the biggest challenges was doing a piece to camera. I found it very difficult to speak naturally so kept this to a minimum. I should have also allowed more time for viewers to read text on screen.

Creating the video footage ironically raised surveillance issues about me as a lone, middle-aged woman filming in children’s playgrounds raised a few eyebrows. Holly Blackford’s article addresses just this situation as the only way she was able to conduct her study of mothers watching their small children at playgrounds was because she actually was one of them (Blackford 2004).  I was careful to film only unoccupied public playgrounds. This reinforced my argument that children today are not playing so much in the outdoors but online.

One of the playgrounds I filmed had a maze with 1.2m walls which allowed children some degree of privacy, and hedged spaces from which little children could peep out. This aligned with playgrounds in fast food outlets where children are relatively hidden from parental eyes (Blackford 2004). The concept of the panopticon in relation to playground behaviour (of adults and children) is fascinating and, as my interviews my two children in the video show, is directly relatable to young people’s online experiences.

Baruh & Soysal provided background discussion of social network sites and the levels of disclosure and self expression they permit, along with a look at privacy concerns. 

Marx & Steeves (2010) provided insight into the privacy implications of online engagement for children and the way information and communication technologies are now such a part of everyday life that humans are affected from cradle (even before birth: think of fuzzy ultrasound images) to the grave and beyond, as we grapple with the ramifications of digital legacy.

From RFID* enabled baby's pyjamas, to baby monitors, to CCTVs in childcare centres and schools, to nanny cams, biometric ID and fingerprinting for library borrowing, GPS locators, to online monitoring software, to testing your teenager’s underwear for the presence of semen, Marx & Steeves note that ‘increasingly restrictive controls are part of a broader societal trend towards a “politics of fear”’ (2010, p214).

More than one scholarly source focused on the concepts of risk and trust (in relation to children’s online experience) and suggested that constant surveillance is denying children opportunities to learn about these fundamental aspects of human interaction (Rooney 2010, Verberne 2014, Media Smarts, Johnson 2012). The development of children’s autonomy is an important part of parenting and the research suggests that if the balance of trust and risk that parents and children are constantly negotiating is out of kilter then children’s ability to develop autonomy is hindered (Rooney 2010, p350-351).

Foucault’s concept of panopticonic surveillance, as it applies to parenting, was discussed by Blackford (2004) and Henderson, Harman and Houser (2010) mostly with the focus on how fear governs modern parenting practices (Henderson, Harman and Houser 2010, p233).

Consistent with my small survey, the Kanter, Afifi and Robbins 2012 article states that children ‘friending’ a parent on Facebook ‘did NOT result in perceptions of greater privacy invasions’, conversely it was ‘associated with decreased conflict in the parent-child relationship’ and my personal experience endorses this.

*Radio Frequency Identification

References:

Baruh, L and Soysal, L 2010, ‘Public intimacy and the new face (book) of surveillance: the role of social media in shaping contemporary dataveillance’, in Dumova, T and Fiordo, R (eds.), Handbook of Research on Social Interaction Technologies and Collaboration Software: Concepts and Trends, Information Science Reference, Hershey, pp. 392-403

Blackford, H 2004, ‘Playground Panopticism: Ring-Around-the-Children, Pocketful of Women’, Childhood, 2004 Vol. 11, pp 227-249

http://chd.sagepub.com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/content/11/2/227.full.pdf+html? retrieved 29 August 2014

Fowler, G A 2013, ‘Life and Death online: who controls a digital legacy?’, The Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, 5 January 2013, A1, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324677204578188220364231346 retrieved 11 September 2014

Henderson, A, Harman, S & Houser J 2010, ‘A New State of Surveillance? Applying Michel Foucault to Modern Motherhood’, Surveillance & Society, Vol. 7, No 3/4, pp231-247

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/4153/4156 retrieved 29 August 2014

Johnson, M 2012, ‘Resilient resourceful and under surveillance,’ Our Schools / Our Selves, Fall 2012, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p151-153

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=14b780f8-8700-48cd-b9e3-bf5eadc08cee%40sessionmgr4002&vid=35&hid=4205 retrieved 29 August 2014

Kanter, M, Afifi, T and Robbins S 2012, ‘The Impact of Parents "Friending" Their Young Adult Child on Facebook on Perceptions of Parental Privacy Invasions’, Journal of Communication, Vol. 62 Issue 5, October 2012, pp.900-917

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy-m.deakin.edu.au/eds/detail/detail?vid=7&sid=f83f8cf6-4c5a-4f00-9cbe-123ff3f65aa5%40sessionmgr198&hid=115&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=ufh&AN=82180042 retrieved 4 September 2014

Marx, G and Steeves, V 2010, ‘From the Beginning: Children as Subjects and Agents of Surveillance,’ Surveillance & Society, July 2010, Issue 3/4, pp.192-39

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/eds/detail/detail?vid=12&sid=7dbba6fd-243c-4aac-8b76-771989b0ec09%40sessionmgr4004&hid=4111&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=sih&AN=53696178 retrieved 30 August 2014

Media Smarts (n.d.), ‘Types of Surveillance’, http://mediasmarts.ca/privacy/types-surveillance, retrieved 29 August 2014

Rooney, T 2010, ‘Trusting children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child's experience of trust, risk and responsibility?’, Surveillance & Society, July 2010, Vol 7, Issue 3/4, p344-355.

http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=1480fc8e-663d-4f29-bd3c-b0bebc851aaf%40sessionmgr113&hid=104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=sih&AN=53696188 retrieved 30 August 2014

Verberne, M 2014, ‘The Sad State of Play in Australian Schools’, The Age newspaper, 1 September 2014

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/the-sad-state-of-play-in-australian-schools-20140827-1084kb.html