After watching the film ’The Circle’ with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, I realised something very interesting.
The character Eamon Bailey played by Tom Hanks asks the question ‘Do you behave better when being watched?’ which really made me think more about the meaning of my project.
My personal answer to this question is Yes, I do believe that I behave better when being watched, however I do not feel that I fulfill my true potential as a human being as I am too worried about doing doing something wrong or stupid when in reality if I was not being watched I may be able to perform a lot better in certain situations.
There are a lot of ethical issues with the idea The Circle gives off, where they have cameras all over the world and they watch all of their employees very very closely. If we knew everything about everyone, then life would not be interesting, we wouldn’t need to converse with others or become friendly with anyone as we would already know their every move.
When I worked at Superdrug, they would be watching the cameras throughout the whole shift and that feeling of knowing you are being watched can be really scary when working, I constantly felt as if I was doing stuff wrong and from this I would be so preoccupied in my thoughts that I would make so many mistakes.
I feel that when I am being watched I am unable to think about anything else other than that and where I am being watched from. Meaning I find it extremely difficult to get on with my life.
There is however the aspect of, maybe people would commit less crimes, less murders, less assault, which would be amazing, but this also means our justice system would change and would almost give a lot more power to those in charge meaning our laws could become extremely strict to the point where we would basically live under a dictatorship.
This is what it felt like living with my step dad, he would somehow always know everything we did at all times and so we were so scared to do anything bad (even though sometimes, when I think about it now, it wasn’t necessarily bad, they just made us believe it was), because of this we had extremely strict rules, we had to ask if we could eat or drink, we were only allowed 1 hot meal a day which we would get at school, we had a very strict curfew where if we were late by just 5 minutes we would get grounded, we had dedicated chores which had to be completed to an extremely high standard, etc etc, many things and because we felt we were constantly being watched, we had to do all of these.
So in general, yes I do believe people behave better, but I believe that no one should hold the power of being able to watch people with everything they do and say as this takes away the humane aspect of things and takes away people’s freedom and lives.