Practises in Looking

Identifying the differences between 'Seeing' and 'Looking'

- Seeing is an arbitrary concept that we do on a regular basis without thought

- Looking is a choice we are aware of and involves a sense of purpose. 

Philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes explained that an image has two levels of meaning. The is the Denotative meaning which is when an image to denote specific truths and indicate an idea of documentary evidence of objective circumstances while the Connotative meaning of an image connotes a more culturally specific meaning. 

There are circumstances in which we ourselves are the ones being look at with the most prominent example being the use of CCTV. CCTV plays with power as there is nothing we can do to stay out of their view and we have no say as to whether we wish to be watched by unseen surveyors or not. We are given no input and yet we tend to ignore them as they are background elements. Even we our minds let us forget that we are being watched, we are still being observed which brings about the idea of voyeurism as there are times when we are unaware that we are being watched at all. 

Michel Foucault

Another philosopher who declared that modern societies are designed in a way that makes people take part in self-regulating behaviour and are willing to obey laws as well as conform to dominant social values. His idea claims that modern societies do not work through coercion but instead work through cooperation as a society.

Using the idea of being watched, Jeremy Bentham designed a prison dubbed the 'Panopticon' which was designed in a way that the guards can see every prisoner without even moving and prisoners can see each other as the building was designed in a circle with the guard tower in the middle.

This meant that prisoners acted differently then they would when out of sight in other prisons. The tower was designed so that the prisoners couldn't tell if someone was in or not. I bring this up because this displays that people act differently when being observed and even more so when they aren't even sure if someone is even watching at that moment in time, similar to CCTV cameras. A CCTV camera may not even be on but there is no way of telling so we still acknowledge the possibility of being watched.