Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
Which socio-technical arrangements and conditions can foster enlarged,
enhanced experiences of citizenship within a world of digital networks? Which
kinds of practices and institutions on the Net tend to discourage or constrain
possibilities of that kind?
In discussions about politics and the digital realm, much attention is given to
features of software and networks. By comparison, relatively little study is devoted
to significance of these features to the experience of people who will
eventually face them. In matters involving technological choice, perhaps the
most widely ignored question is: Who to be? That is to say: Who will we become
as the devices and systems are installed and enter into common use? As new
features emerge within digital devices and systems, it is important to anticipate what
forms of social and political experience will likely be fostered by particular technical
and institutional patterns. Here I will examine briefly two contemporary examples
in which computer software and the Internet have been configured in ways that have
significant consequences for people’s sense of self and their ability to enter public life.
Some of the most effective constraints upon the psychology of freedom arise on
the Net as ordinary people try to go about their everyday business only to discover
that powerful forces have, to a great extent, defined them as suspects — people expected
to break the rules and even to commit criminal acts. A commonly proposed
remedy is to deploy surveillance systems to induce compliance. Since the invention
of the Panopticon in 1785 by Jeremy Bentham and his brother Samuel, the force of
surveillance structures within prisons, schools, hospitals, and places of public gathering
has been central theme in social science and architecture. The basic hypothesis
is that if the design of a building or institution imposes a continuing experience
of being watched, people’s immediate and long-term behavior will be affected in
favorable ways. The Benthams hoped such experience could be marshaled for positive
social reform, instilling memories of panoptic surveillance within subjects who
needed to achieve more positive roles in society. Revisiting the matter in the late
20th century, however, Michel Foucault decried the broader dynamics of oppression
embedded in designs and social structures of this kind. Left unchecked, today’s
Internet could become the site of widely used forms of panoptic surveillance, highly
useful to some, but debilitating to the long-term prospects for a free subjectivity
required to sustain democratic societies.
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