In the interdisciplinary honor’s course that I taught on ‘Ways of Seeing’ we studied the sense of sight in critical historical perspective. The gaze, glance, look or stare of an individual spectator or a collective audience were put through a telescope and under a microscope. With technological change, the possibilities of representation and falsification exploded. Little was or is indexical and the quest for a pefect truth and indisputable verisimilitude was, at best, elusive. With the addition of ‘cookies’ to the mix and the reflexivity that has been built into the sense of sight, we have entered a new era. The lessons of the past about limiting the ‘look back’ process are more important than ever before. We can and must find a way to curtail the capacity of Big Brother to look back and act in ways that generate the kinds of censorship and self-censorship that would destroy basic civil liberties.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 15:41:58 +0000
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