Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena (original) (raw)

2022, 'Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena' in The Technologisation of the Social (eds. Paul O'Connor & Marius Benta), London & New York: Routledge

Not long before Covid-19 upended the world, my wife and I went for a meal at our favourite Indian restaurant. Like many establishments in the United Arab Emirates, it offers curtained-off booths where families can dine in privacy. After a pleasant meal, I asked for the bill, and the waiter suggested we review the restaurant on TripAdvisor or Zomato. We agreed, and he asked if we would mind doing so there and then, requesting that we mention him by name. The waiter hovered over us as my wife took out her phone and wrote a quick review. This incident started me thinking about the pressures generated by our ubiquitous visibility as citizens of a digitalised world. The restaurant evidently felt a need to generate online reviews, since this is now a principal means of attracting customers. This pressure was transmitted to the staff and used as a disciplinary tool-being praised in reviews would demonstrate staff were providing quality service. The staff, in turn, transferred it to customers. It was as though, after the quiet intimacy of our meal in the curtained booth, the walls suddenly turned to glass, and we found ourselves blinking amid the perpetual florescent visibility of the virtual world. From our perspective, the incident at the restaurant was a relatively trivial one; from that of the staff, less so, as a cumulative failure to garner positive reviews might threaten their jobs. In either case, it is a symptom of something larger, a trend in contemporary life I have termed 'coercive visibility'. Coercive visibility is a process by which an ever-greater portion of our lives is made transparent to the critical judgement of non-intimates, in ways which are increasingly institutionalised, often quantified and operate to mould conduct and identity. It is expanding in importance as digital technology makes us visible to a growing array of individuals, organisations and institutions, often in ways which encode asymmetric relations of power. This visibility is 'coercive', firstly because insertion into the public-or quasi-public gaze is frequently not a matter of choice, and secondly because the process moulds us to comply with the disciplinary requirements of late modern society. Bernard Harcourt (2015: 15) writes that our digitalised lives render us 'legible to others, open, accessible, subject to everyone's idiosyncratic projects-whether governmental, commercial, personal, or intimate'. Harcourt draws a line between Coercive visibility