Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The 24-hour courtwatches in Philadelphia provide a rare quantitative account of something that all courtwatchers report feeling as they sit in the audience: that they are changing the proceedings just by being there.
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In social science, this is known as the observer effect or, relatedly, the Hawthorne effect: People change their behavior when they know they’re being watched.
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In prisons, in schools, in hospitals, the architecture of observation by those in charge becomes a way to dominate and control people through surveillance.
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Social theorists call the turning of surveillance on those in power—watching the watchers—“sousveillance,” or surveillance from below. Sousveillance is a way to challenge the monopoly of those in power over information, technology, and control. And courtwatchers model how sousveillance becomes even more powerful when done collectively at the very location of domination, such as a courtroom.
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Most fundamentally, the observers make the silent argument that those accused of crimes are people, too.
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Communal observation on its own cannot cure unfairness, even if it changes the behavior of state actors slightly in the moment.
✏️ It’s not perfect and not all-changing. 🔗 View Highlight
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the performance that the Philadelphia courtwatchers observed when the attorneys and magistrate seemed to carefully consider and argue a case before them might represent an ideal example of public justice. And yet, when the person went to jail after the magistrate set bail, the result did not become “justice”—or at least not the courtwatchers’ idea of justice—simply because the legal language of incarceration became momentarily comprehensible. Instead, the performance highlighted for the courtwatchers the absurdity of a system in which state actors can, on command, recite with feeling the arguments, reinforced over decades, necessary to justify incarceration.
✏️ This is digging a little bit into the idea that, justice isn’t served by observing those at play, and without the act of watching, injustice was happening. Injustice is likely happening regardless, but the act of watching enforced a sense of “performance” on the part of the justice system. It needs to be kept in mind that the whole system isn’t exactly a “just” one in the first place. 🔗 View Highlight