I wanted to talk for a minute about the title of this paper, Watching You, Watching Me, and how we came up with that title and why it's important, I think, to understand our paper. It's a reference to the Panopticon, which was first written about by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The vision was for a prison, a prison design that was designed with a circle.
with the cells all the way around the outside and a watchtower in the middle. And the watchtower is where the guard would be and would be able to see into every cell. But the important part about this is both that the guardman could see every cell and the prisoners knew. knew that they could be watched, but they didn't know if they were being watched at any given moment in time.
Now this imagery was very powerful. Foucault has used it in some of his writing. And the information technology world picked this up in the late 1980s when Shoshana Zuboff wrote a book where she used this panoptic metaphor to think about surveillance and the fact that information technology can be always watching and observing people. Now, this makes a lot of sense, but when we sort of, in our interviews... as we thought about it, we think that this has missed something very important.
The first is that employees aren't prisoners, right? That is certainly a very important first thing. And so just to use technology in the way we might watch prisoners in an organization is a bit problematic.
So that's one thing. And the second thing that I think that this misses is that the watchtower is very visible to the prisoners all the time. And technology is not.
We often forget that it's there. And so what the Navy has been doing by contextualizing is reminding people, essentially, that the watchtower is there, and you need to be careful, and that you are being observed. And it helps them to remember to internalize and remember not to talk about the ship's location, and to keep the sort of watchtower in mind, and to get vets, the sailors, bought into, because they're not prisoners, they are employees, and they have choices about where they work and how they act, that they sort of, they see why it's important that they are being watched, they can sort of buy into the process. So the Panopticon sort of is a really nice metaphor that is important in our paper and really helps you understand both why the organization is doing the things that they're doing and the role of the employees in sort of sustaining it and making the system actually work.