Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Digital media provides us with many ways of satisfying our desires to see and be seen.Democratic theorists have introduced concepts such as "audience democracy," "ocular power," and "spectatorship" to emphasize the experiences of watching in contemporary politics.Can the people exert power over political leaders simply by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch?How can we understand the conundrum that being seen can be potentially oppressive to an individual, who is subjected to the scrutiny of the watcher, but also empowering, as those on the public stage influence what is seen and how they are seen?Democratic theorists have focused on the people's experiences as spectators of their political leaders, with little consideration of the people's experiences of being seen.By conceptualizing spectatorship as a socially embedded and dual-ended process that affects both those who see and those who are seen, I examine the ways various forms of inequalities -social, economic, and political -may shape experiences of being seen.I turn to the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, and Adam Smith to show how ideas about seeing and being seen have been a part of ideas about representative government and liberalism for centuries and can illuminate contemporary ethical and political questions about accountability, media, privacy, and surveillance.Each thinker brings into focus a different perspective: the state seeing its subjects and controlling what they see, the democratic citizens overseeing the state, and individuals observing each other.I attend to particular epistemic, Chapter 1 Introduction: The Rise of Audience Democracy "I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become."-Jean-Paul Sartre 1"Someone who has never reflected cannot be clement, or just, or pitying; nor can he be wicked and vindictive.He who imagines nothing feels only himself; in the midst of mankind he is alone."-Jean-JacquesRousseau 2In the spring of 2001, George Kateb proposed that the technological development of expansive data collection and surveillance, though motivated by various purposes that did not include "total domination," could become "irreversibly tyrannical" as the result of a single "trauma," a warning resembling prophecy to those concerned about the expansion of American domestic surveillance programs after 9/11. 3 Before that violent spectacle rendered fear and 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays.New York: Vintage Books, 1958, 21.
Author: Kristen R. Collins
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Georgetown University
OpenAlex ID: W3044148068