I visited the exhibition Strange Days: Memories of the future in a super cold and windy morning. 21 fantastic (also a bit weird) short films from different artists were shown in the exhibition, and the gallery itself was decorated and arranged in a very mysterious way, which gave me an excellent and special experience.
But this post is more about one of the works: The Looks by Wu Tsang.
The Looks was shown in a room which requires us to enter without shoes. The room was covered by soft white blanket and divided into two parts by two projection walls. The first part of the film, in which a girl was woken up by a robotic voice and started to get ready for a show, was projected on the first wall, and with a big heavy loud sound, the show was projected on to the second wall. The whole film is set in a futuristic background, the girl was covered by glitter and had something like a flash light in her mouth when she was giving the show, and wherever she goes, people stare at her and focus cameras on her. The artist Wu Tsang described the girl as a “Digital avatars that control humans through a panoptical social media platform”, and with the work he calls into question the potential of technology, and imagined a future with both social control and “pockets of ecstatic freedom”.
Well, that’s not futuristic for me at all. I’ve seen thousands of people arguing online defending their idols, I’ve seen a post of a pop star on Weibo (Chinese social media) being reposted millions of times. I’ve seen people spending money on something they can’t really afford, just because their idols are using the same product, and I’ve seen people trying to kill themselves because their idols started dating someone… Which really looks like they are being controlled by some secret power, and have this worship towards their idols, their avatars. However, for those who are worshipped, we can’t really know if they want everyone to love them like crazy. Let’s come back to the short film The Looks, one thing that interested me is that the girl on the stage, covered by glitter, didn’t seem happy. She didn’t seem to be satisfied with everyone’s attention. On the contrary, she seemed unnatural, even painful. It seems like she doesn’t want all of this.
I once read that in South Korea and Japan (maybe in China as well), members of pop groups are not allowed to have romantic relationships (some said not allowed to have it in public, which means they can only have a secret boyfriend of girlfriend), and almost everything in their lives, their schedules, their outfits, hair colour… are managed by the entertainment companies, just to create the “perfect image” for fans. So, in another way, it’s not the Avatars who are controlling people, it’s the people who are controlling them. Once everyone starts focusing on you, you can’t just do what you want, say what you like, taking the risk that people would be disappointed to you. And day after day, you’re becoming their puppet.
Well, I’m not challenging the idea of this short film, after all it’s the artist who wants it to show the control a character has over people with the help of media and technology, and that kind of control does exist and is playing a not ignorable part in our life. But it’s kind of interesting to see it from another perspective. And here comes the question: Do we still have the control of ourselves?
Some thoughts and research. (They are the extension of the diary so I didn’t put the quotes in the text.)
Whether we have free will or not is a very old philosophical question. Some says we can make our own choices, while the others think all the choices we make are influenced by outside world, so we don’t actually have free will. I don’t really want to choose a side, but looking back to my life, what I eat for breakfast, which way I choose to go to uni, what book I read… many, or I can even say most of the choices I make are not because I want to, but because there’s not enough time, or it costs more if I don’t do it that way, or someone told me it’s better to do it that way… In that case, do I still have the control of my life?
Thinking of ourselves as being in control of how we act is part of what enables us to see living as something so valuable. In so far as we can direct and control how we ourselves act, our lives can be genuinely our own achievement or failure. Our lives can be our own, not merely to be enjoyed or endured, but for ourselves to direct and make.
Or so we think. But are we really in charge of our actions? Is how we act truly up to us as things such as the past, the nature of the universe, even many of our own beliefs and feelings, are not? The problem of whether we are ever in control of how we act, and what this control involves, is what philosophers call the free will problem.
The phrase Eleutheia (freedom) was first only used in political discussion, then used to pick out an individual person’s control over their own action when philosophers started to consider about whether how we act was really up to us. In nowadays’ world, we (most of us) have the freedom to support different political opinions. But we’re only legally free, after all those campaign and advertising, are we still capable of controlling our own minds and making our own choice?
The Greek philosopher Aristotle discussed actions and our control over them in one of the oldest and most important discussions of morality by a philosopher-the Nicomachean Ethics. But in the Ethics though Aristotle talked of us as having control of how we act – he stated that our actions are eph hemin, or, literally, ‘up to us’- he did not actually use eleutheria, the Greek word for freedom, to describe this action control. Eleutheria was still a term used only in political discussion as a name for political freedom or liberty.It was in the period after Aristotle that Greek philosophers began using eleutheria in a new and entirely non-political sense, to pick out the idea of being in control of how we act. And ever since then philosophers discussing the up-to-us-ness of our actions have followed the later Greeks: the same term freedom, which is used to pick out political liberty, has also been used to pick out an individual person’s control over their own actions.If what you do really is within your control, then you can be said to be free to act otherwise than as you actually are doing. You are, as philosophers put it, a free agent.
Tomas Pink
2004
Free Will – A very short introduction
Published in the United States
Published by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Is our Identity controlling us? I would like to buy dress and make up because I choose to be beautiful, I act calm and quiet because I don’t like being dramatic, I take care of young ones because I like looking after others. Or is it I would love to buy dress and make up because I’m a girl, I act calm and quiet because I’m Asian (I don’t know if I’m the only one who thinks that), I take care of young ones because I’m the oldest kid in the family, and it’s my responsibility to do that, so that become something I do unconsciously…? Are we still able to do anything we want once we’re identified as a certain kind of people?
On the one hand, the celebration of the group’s uniqueness, which is the basis of its political solidarity, can be translated into essentialist claims For example, some elements of the women’s movement have argued for separatism from men based on women’s identity and unique qualities which men per se cannot possess. There are, of course different ways of understanding and defining that “uniqueness’. It may involve appeals to biologically given features of identity; for example, the claim that women’s biological role as mothers makes them inherently more caring and peaceful.
Or it can be based on appeals to history and kinship: for example, where
women seek to establish an exclusive women’s history or ‘herstory'(Daly,
1979)which men have repressed, and to reclaim a unique women’s culture
through a claim to something about the position of women which has
remained fixed and unchanged by that history and which applies equally to
all women as a kind of transhistorical truth (Jeffreys, 1985)
Kathryn Woodward
1997
Identity And Difference
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Published by The Open University, SAGE Publications
Television and all kinds of media are everywhere. With all the advertisements playing all the time, can we still make our own decision without being influenced?
Developed in America, the theory started with the finding that heavy viewers and light viewers tend to have different attitudes towards and perceptions of very many matters.The theory supposed that televisions influence had brought about such differences.
Mallory Wober, Barrie Gunter
1988
Television and Social Control
Gower Publishing Company Limited, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hants GU11 3HR, England
Published by Gower Publishing Company Limited
It’s very obvious that surveillance system is used as a control of people. The best example is the Telescreen in George Orwell’s novel 1984. But it’s not only exist in the novel, but also playing an important part in the real life.
Surveillance – the garnering of personal data for detailed analysis – now occurs routinely, locally and globally, as an unavoidable feature of everyday life in contemporary societies.
Edited by David Lyon
2003
Surveillance As Social Sorting – Privacy, risk and digital discrimination
Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Published by Routledge
How does the surveillance control us? Here’s a very good example:
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 CNBC interview about concern over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Glenn Greenwald
2014
No Place To Hide
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Penguin Group
Under the surveillance, you have to take the risk of “being seen” no matter what you’re doing. But even if everything we do is legal, is not harmful to anyone, there still are things that we don’t want others to see. And the surveillance clearly doesn’t care about that, which somehow means it’s controlling us by only letting us do things that can be seen.