do what you want!” “Where you think no one sees you – Bachelor thesis

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“Where you think no one sees you –

do what you want!”

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Upper Secondary School Students’

Perception of Surveillance

Bachelor thesis

Author: Tobias Svensson Supervisor: Per Sivefors Examiner: Anna Thyberg Term: Fall 2020

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Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to juxtapose students’ perceptions of surveillance to the

surveillance portrayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. By using Michel Foucault’s expansion of Jeremy Bentham’s discussion of the Panopticon, this essay shows that upper secondary school students modify their behaviour, like the characters in the novel, when they are under surveillance. Furthermore, this essay argues that even though there have been vast developments in the field of surveillance since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, similar notions of concern regarding the impact of surveillance on the human psyche are still upheld by students. This essay expands upon current research which points to desensitization regarding the impact of surveillance on younger generations and a gap between current knowledge and necessary knowledge for an informed opinion. By juxtaposing students’ perceptions of surveillance and that portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this essay provides insights into why this topic could be dealt with in the EFL-classroom as a means of providing students with the opportunity to develop their knowledge on social issues and cultural features which could make them more aware of the cultural impact of constant surveillance.

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1 Introduction

One of the themes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is how constant

surveillance affects the human psyche. Written after the Second World War, Orwell’s novel creates a futuristic dystopia where a totalitarian government rules through fear and

punishment. The protagonist, Winston Smith, reflects upon his experience of living in a totalitarian state where surveillance by “Big Brother” is one of the key factors of the

government’s ability to control their subjects and tries to subtly rebel against it. In the story, the reader follows Winton’s hate-filled rebellion against “the Party,” a rebellion that can only take place in privacy. However, using “telescreens,” monitors that both send and receive visual and auditory information, the notion of privacy is strictly limited by the ruling class. The constant monitoring through telescreens, and additionally the constant reporting of suspicious behavior, i.e., behavior that does not comply with the strict social norms imposed, have made a code of law redundant. As everyone is constantly supervised by cameras, microphones, and suspected by their peers, the novel portrays, among other themes, how to comply with, and rebel against, such infringements of privacy.

The theme of constant surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four and its infringement of privacy is a theme that have been examined countless times before. Many previous studies on surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four have relied heavily on Michel Foucault’s expansion on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.1_{The Panopticon is a circular prison with a watchtower in the} middle from where all inmates can be seen at any time, hence the term panoptic, meaning all-seeing. For the literary analysis, this thesis will follow the same trail as previous research, as it will examine the panoptic aspects of the surveillance portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, surveillance today is no longer seen as merely a panoptic phenomenon. According

1_{See e.g., Michael Yeo’s article “Propaganda and Surveillance in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Two}

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to Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, both the Panopticon and George Orwell’s Big Brother have for a long time dominated the discussion related to the developments of

surveillance. They argue, however, that both Foucault’s and Orwell’s concepts must be stretched beyond recognition in order to suit the current developments in the area and choose thus to use different analytical tools to explore aspects of surveillance (607-08).

Technological advances, both in general and for the purpose of surveillance, have reached further than Orwell and Foucault could imagine. The expansion of surveillance has been aided by intensifications and variations in the capability of technology, and the vast and rapid growth of monitoring devices. The introduction of smart phones, social media, and a vast digitalization of ordinary life has also brought about new ways of surveilling individuals through the collection of data and metadata, thus producing the field of dataveillance. Hence, surveillance today is better understood by a post-panoptic framework than a panoptic, as information about objects is no longer just collected from a literal all-seeing perspective, but also through the collection of metadata. While panopticism focuses on the relation between the observer and the observed, in Bentham’s and Foucault’s case the prison guard and the inmate, post-panopticism broadens the view to a multiplicity of observers on a single object. However, Orwell’s portrayal of how constant supervision affects the human psyche bears resemblance to how students from around the world reflect upon being under constant surveillance.

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Eighty-Four by others, this thesis claims that even though the structure of surveillance is vastly different today, similar notions of concern are still held by students today as when Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published in 1949. As students around the world have varying concerns regarding surveillance, control, discipline, and privacy, it seems reasonable to examine why Nineteen Eighty-Four can be used in the EFL classroom to deal with these newly emerged and vastly expanding social issues and living conditions. According to the syllabus for English in Swedish upper secondary schools, all students should be given the opportunity to develop “[t]he ability to discuss and reflect on living conditions, social issues and cultural features in different contexts and parts of the world where English is used” (Natl. Ag. f. Ed. 2). This thesis argues that Nineteen Eighty-Four can be used in the EFL classroom to give the students an outlet to deal with their issues related to constant supervision, which over the years have become more and more prevalent in our society. Contemporary research suggests that “students’ current understanding of surveillance, privacy and related concepts is quite basic even though it is clear that they are concerned by current developments” (Eleyan and Persson 24-25), but also that “[s]urveillance has become a normalized facet of young people’s online lives” (Shade and Singh 9). Students’ own perception of surveillance is not a heavily researched topic; however, being under constant surveillance has become a living condition that many students have concerns about. This study aims to point to a small gap in the field by juxtaposing of Orwell’s novel and students’ perspectives on surveillance, thus trying to provide some new material that can be further developed by others.

2 Overview of the implications of surveillance

In this section, the foundations of the theoretical approaches panopticism and

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will be followed by an overview of the research conducted on students’ perception of school surveillance from three countries. The interviews published in these texts constitute the basis for the upcoming analysis where they will be juxtaposed with segments of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Michel Foucault’s discussion on the Panopticon.

2.1 Panopticism and post-panopticism

In the book Discipline and Punish, Foucault examines the development of the penal

institutions in the West and reflects upon the topic of surveillance in relation to this. Foucault discusses the architectural structure of Bentham’s Panopticon, which is designed to observe and control its inmates efficiently. The Panopticon is an annular building surrounding a watchtower, from where one can see into the ring. The annular building is divided into cells, from where one can only see the watchtower, as walls separate individuals from each other (Foucault 200). From the point of view of the guardian, a mass of people is separated, numbered, and supervised, while the individuals are isolated and observed in solitude. This creates the major effect of the Panopticon: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic function of power” (Foucault 201). The inmate is always an object of information. This will, according to Foucault, make sure that the inmate is always on his best behaviour, since he may at any moment be observed. The effect of panopticism is successful as the suppression is internalized by the inmates, thus making them guard themselves. As will be shown in section three, the effect of panopticism is visible both in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and in interviews with upper secondary school students from three different countries.

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book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that all things do not form a cohesive whole, but instead that there are multiplicities that cannot be subsumed under a guiding principle or totality. They connect this to bulbs and tubers, which are rhizomes. Rhizomes are plants which grow in surface extensions with interconnected vertical root systems, in contrast with arborescent plants which usually grow with deep roots and above surface level branch out from the trunk. What they mean by this is that rhizomatic structures do not have a mapped trajectory. They seem to grow in which direction they please, they do not have a beginning nor and end, and do not necessarily follow the normal ideas of cause and effect – there seems to be no proper way to understand it: “The rhizome operates by variation, expansion,

conquest, capture, offshoots” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). When you engage with a rhizome, you do not engage with a single unit or individual, you are engaging with multiplicities of things, which are all interconnected. This presents a kind of radical egalitarianism where everything is recognized as being just part of everything else, or at least having the potential to be connected to everything else. A structure that is rhizomatic is thus also very difficult to remove, in contrast to an arborescent. An arborescent structure may be plucked out by the roots and tossed aside, while “[a] rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 9). To

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2.2 Surveillance and dataveillance

Surveillance can be defined in a few different ways. Traditionally, there are two approaches to examining surveillance: a neutral approach, and a negative approach (Fuchs 135). Neutral approaches to surveillance argue that any form of systematic information gathering is

surveillance, and that surveillance is both necessary for organization and a fundamental aspect of all societies. Based on a neutral surveillance concept, all gathering, and storage of

information is crucial for both sustenance and development. In contrast, negative approaches to surveillance regard it as:

a form of systematic information gathering that is connected to domination, coercion, the threat of using violence or the actual use of violence in order to attain certain goals and accumulate power, in many cases against the will of those who are under

surveillance. (Fuchs 135)

Strictly speaking, negative approaches to surveillance focus solely on how gathering of information may be used as a leverage against the person being observed, while neutral surveillance simply collects and stores information. Discussions regarding what impact surveillance has on the observed mainly uses the negative approaches to surveillance, a trend that will be followed by this thesis.

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gather information. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems are a typical example of a technology used for this purpose. Secondly, identification and tracking are conducted to identify the object and track its movements and/or motives. Identification is done by

recognizing a person’s identity through analysis of the person’s unique features. Tracking is done by tracing the individual once it has been identified. The third category is analytical intervention. This refers to the transformation of the collected data into knowledge through analysis. Problems might arise in this step of the process if the knowledge produced is considered as absolute truths and used as a basis for recommendations of public policies or business decisions. According to Esposti, “when the knowledge produced through analytical intervention is translated into organizational strategies, procedures and practices, we are observing the last and most controversial category of action of dataveillance - i.e. behavioral manipulation” (212). Behavioral manipulation refers to the ability to influence people’s actions intentionally, however, the term “manipulation” does not take into consideration if the influence is positive or negative on the individual’s life (Esposti 220). In contrast to van Dijck, Esposti identifies dataveillance as not just neutral data gathering for unspecified purposes, but rather that the unspecified collection of data becomes a tool for behavioral manipulation through analysis and application. However, regarding dataveillance used in schools, analysis and application are not always needed to modify students behavior, as will be shown in the analysis.

2.3 Students’ perceptions of surveillance

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Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is also used to some extent to monitor where the students are located. Hope states that RFID microchips are “embedded in uniforms, backpacks and identity cards in Japan, the United states and the United Kingdom” to enable school

administrations and parents to track students’ location (890). Furthermore, in some schools in Melbourne, students swipe their RFID card upon arrival to school which sends an automatic email to their parents notifying them that their child has arrived at school (Hope 890). The most common form of surveillance in schools however is through CCTV, as cameras are used to improve security globally (Hope 892; Nemorin 248). On the whole, different forms of surveillance techniques are used around the world to monitor students’ locations and actions, but not much has been written on the students’ own perceptions of being constantly

monitored. This creates an interesting opportunity to use literary texts to give the students an opportunity to reflect upon cultural features of their own society in relation to surveillance, which will be discussed further in section four. First, however, students’ perceptions of

surveillance must be identified. The interviews presented in the texts below will be juxtaposed to the portrayal of surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four in section three.

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supervision (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1321). Some students agree that security of school property and students can be a justifiable cause for CCTV, but still remain sceptical whether their own school installed them for this reason and were concerned that their own school used the CCTV mainly for school discipline (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1322).

In an Australian article, “Post-panoptic Pedagogies: The Changing Nature of School Surveillance in the Digital Age,” author Selena Nemorin argues that the digital dimensions of new modes of surveillance no longer focus solely on discipline and control. While panoptic forms of surveillance can be present in schools, for example CCTV, the more immaterial surveillance in form of e-learning and content management platforms becomes more and more prevalent. Surveillance of collected data – dataveillance – “is becoming increasingly foundational to the school as an institution of discipline and control and merits attention” (249). According to Nemorin, hybrid modes of surveillance, a mix of panoptic and rhizomatic, have gained momentum and are spreading rapidly in school environments, monitoring both students and educators (251). Nemorin’s study shows that in a school surveillance context, students also take part of the surveillance by monitoring and reporting each other. The article focuses mostly on interviews with teachers and headmasters on three different schools in Australia. However, some students are also quoted, and some parts of the article focus on the students’ perception of the surveillance inflicted upon them.

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target users. The authors have a neutral view on surveillance and examine which ways mobile surveillance applications can offer value from an upper secondary school students’

perspective, and how an understanding of this perspective can inform the design of mobile surveillance applications intended to be used in schools. Twelve Swedish upper secondary school students were interviewed, with varying response towards surveillance. The responses correspond well with Selena Nemorin’s interviews with students, teachers, and headmasters in Australia. The responses also correlate with the interviews conducted by Birnhack and Perry-Hazan. This indicates that students’ concerns with surveillance is not isolated in some parts of the world but is applicable to a Swedish context. Surveillance, whether CCTV or

dataveillance, is seen by students as a means of security, where the surveillance is interpreted to create a safer environment (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1321; Eleyan and Persson 22; Nemorin 243). By being under constant surveillance, norm-breaking behavior, such as acts of violence and vandalization, can be punished by the school administration, which according to many students, is a good thing. One Australian student states that “if a fight happened or something and the teacher needed to see who did it or on the weekend like some burglar or something” (Nemorin 244), CCTV would be necessary to find the culprit. This aspect, however, does not fall in line with the intention of the panopticon, as the observed do not change their behavior to monitor themselves and will consequently not be analysed and compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four. As will be shown by the analysis, the panoptic

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3 Juxtaposition of Nineteen Eighty-Four and upper secondary

students’ perceptions of surveillance

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell creates a dystopian future in which the reader can follow the inner thoughts and actions of Winston Smith. Winston is a middle-aged citizen of Airstrip One, the region of Oceania which had previously been called England (Orwell 32). Oceania is one of three Cold War influenced superpowers and consists of “the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa” (Orwell 185). Oceania is run by “the Party” and is under scrutiny by a totalitarian government which enforces total control upon its citizens. In this society, privacy and individuality is frowned upon to the extent that it simply no longer exists: “In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone, except in bed . . . to do anything that suggested solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous” (Orwell 81-82). Being seen outside of the area of your home or place of work is considered suspicious behavior and enough to draw the attention of the Thought Police (Orwell 83). Every private space in Oceania is monitored by two-way television screens, called telescreens. The inhabitants of Oceania must assume that there may be hidden microphones everywhere they go, or that their behavior is closely monitored by other Party members who may report them to the Thought Police if they act in a way that does not follow the norm. Winston Smith describes it as:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any

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This description comes very early in the novel and can thus be regarded as a foundation upon which the reader stands during the rest of the novel, together with an earlier introduction of the Party slogan “Big Brother is watching you” (Orwell 1); which can be seen accompanied by a picture of Big Brother on large posters all over London. Wherever any character moves, they are always aware of where the closest telescreen is located; and if no telescreen is in range, they must assume that there might be hidden microphones in the surrounding area. The all-seeing surveillance is almost anticipating Foucault’s explanation of the Panopticon:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual use unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who uses it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearer. (201) In both these passages, the observed become their own means of oppression as the observed are being controlled by surveillance even though they may not be under observation. The ones under surveillance, even though they are not aware if they are being watched or not, act as if they were. Thus, the effect of panopticism is successful. The watchtower in the Panopticon is in Nineteen Eighty-Four represented by Big Brother. He is never seen in person but rather presented through large posters and voices from the telescreens. The inhabitants of Oceania can not be sure that he is a real person, or if he is just a method to keep the population under control. Either way, he creates the effect of being everywhere, constantly watching them. Orwell describes him as:

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are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen . . . . Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are most easily felt towards an individual than toward an organization. (208)

As Big Brother’s identity is covered in a supernatural mist, the citizens of Oceania experience a similar surveillance by an unknown entity as the prisoners of the Panopticon do. In the same way as the guards in the watchtower in the Panopticon, Big Brother acts as an omnipresent observer and thus affects the behavior of the observed.

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“[s]ometimes, when I’m at school alone after classes, doing homework . . . I’m not even sure whether there are cameras; but if there are . . . it’s a bit unpleasant. It’s as if someone is constantly watching me.” (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1323)

This can be compared to a Swedish student who also showed mistrust against surveillance implementations: “It feels like they are spying on you, especially in older ages when you should be allowed to do whatever” (Eleyan and Persson 19). In the Australian schools

examined by Nemorin, CCTV were installed in corridors, and sometimes in classrooms. One Australian student noted that she did not believe that cameras were used in the classroom but that “[t]here might be voice monitors or something . . . My maths teacher said it . . . but he was probably making it up so that we didn’t do anything” (Nemorin 243). Nemorin further states that cameras were not used in all classrooms of the schools she examined, but “the threat of implementation of surveillance equipment was used to discipline and control students” (243). The threat of being caught makes the students change their behavior when they assume that they are being monitored, similar to what is discussed by Foucault (201), thus recreating the effect of the panopticon by making the students monitor themselves.

Various instances like this are portrayed by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One noticeable instance is portrayed through the interaction between Winston and his lover Julia. Julia is stated to have had multiple forbidden lovers before meeting Winston (Orwell 125), whereas Winston has followed Party doctrine by having a loveless marriage to a wife he has not seen in years (Orwell 64). Julia’s experience in evading the Thought Police, the

telescreens, and snooping Party members, has made her an expert in what she calls “talking by instalments” (Orwell 128). By talking in instalments, Winston and Julia can carry a conversation by walking openly in the streets while making sure to not have eye contact, and by turning silent when close to a telescreen or a Party member, only to pick up the

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rebellion against the Party also shows that there is an anger towards the Party and everything it stands for. Winston’s love for Julia is largely based in her disregard of Party principles. This is exemplified by her numerous former lovers, upon when Winston hears this, “[h]is heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope” (Orwell 125). For Winston, any act that goes against the Party doctrine is a rebellion, no matter how small. In a similar way to Winston and Julia, some students chose to rebel against the surveillance, here portrayed by a quote from an Israeli student:

If we want to do something, we’ll do it somewhere . . . Cameras make it worse because we feel that [people] control or follow us. It’s like a baby that someone took his lollypop away. He still wants it . . . We want freedom . . . We’ll do it because of the cameras. It’s kind of a protest. (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1323)

Much like Winston’s rebellion portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, some students will rebel against their monitors simply because they are being monitored, as their anger against their monitors is what drives the rebellion. However, rebellion cannot always take place in plain sight, because of the fear of retribution if caught in action. Winston and Julia manage to find privacy, either in the woods, hiding in plain sight by talking in instalments, but also in an apartment without a telescreen which they secretly rent. They can only express themselves freely when they are not supervised. Consequently, they break all social norms in privacy, as a result of anger towards the fact that they are constantly supervised. This shows that the effect of the panopticon only works when the object believe they are being monitored but does not fully change the behavior of the object when they believe that they are by

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interaction. However, it does not change their behavior once they feel some sense of privacy. Similarly, an Israeli student states that:

[t]here are some places in the school that are more public, and some that are more private and personal. So yes, outside, behave normally, and where you think no one sees you—do what you want. (Birnhack and Perry-Hazan 1323)

This quote further indicates that students change their behavior when they suspect that they are being monitored, somewhat mirroring Foucault who states that:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (202-03)

In this passage, Foucault cements the idea that the surveillance in the panopticon becomes internalized, as the observed monitor their own behavior to suit what is expected of them. This is further demonstrated by Orwell through a, by the Party imposed, punishable offence: Facecrime. Winston describes it as:

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself— anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. (Orwell 62)

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seem to be a drastic parallel to draw, but in its essence the fear of retribution is similar. Both Winston and the students must behave at their best when they are in front of surveillance equipment and internalize the expectation put upon them in fear of some disciplinary action. However, as noted by both Winston and Julia’s interaction through talking by instalments, and both the Israeli, Australian, and Swedish students, the self-regulation is only internalized when the objects suspect that they are being monitored. As they do not suspect that they are always monitored, the self-regulating effect of the panopticon fails to control the object at any given time.

4 Nineteen Eighty-Four in the EFL Classroom

As previously stated, the Panopticon and George Orwell’s Big Brother have for a long time dominated public discussion regarding surveillance. The subject of English in Swedish upper secondary schools aims at helping students develop knowledge of the target language, but also knowledge about the surrounding world so that the students can develop the ability, desire, and confidence to use English in different situations (Natl. Ag. f. Ed. 1). The students should be faced with a variety of learning situations in which they encounter a diversity of written and oral representations of the English language through different media. To be able to understand the content, the students need training and practice in vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and basic syntax knowledge, as well as the ability to put these skills to use in different contexts. Reading, reflecting upon, and discussing a literary text can aid the students in their language development. In their article “Literature and Critical Literacy Pedagogy in the EFL Classroom: Towards a Model of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills,” authors Jelena Bobkina and Svetlana Stefanova argue that a teacher should be careful when choosing which texts to work with in the EFL classroom to avoid teaching literature as a way of only

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to ask themselves when teaching English literature is what literary text to choose. The teacher needs to justify their choice for themselves, for their students, and in some cases for their colleagues and administration. What is the purpose of using this particular text? How can this text help students develop their language skills?

As shown by research on surveillance and its impact on the surveyed, technological advancements in the field of surveillance have taken place without much consideration of its impact on the observed, especially regarding surveillance systems used in school contexts. There also seems to be a gap between Swedish students’ current knowledge and the knowledge required to make an informed opinion as they have little to no experience discussing the topic (Eleyan and Persson 25). The students themselves might not have reflected upon this subject, as it has been a normalized aspect of young people’s lives (Shade and Singh 9). However, the studies on students’ perception on surveillance seem to indicate that they are aware of how it can affect whoever is being observed. This creates an

opportunity to use a literary text to reflect on their own living situation. As stated by Beach and others:

We want to help young people understand the social, political, and cultural contexts that shape their lives. We want to help them see that the literary texts we assign them to read are inscribed with issues of power and shaped by ideological influences as they are created and as they are read. (153)

Studying literary texts can provide the reader with a deeper understanding of oneself, but also of the world around them. It might also lead to a greater understanding of different social issues and cultural features, thus increasing tolerance and respect for others. Learning a language through reading and discussing the material being read might therefore enrichen the students understanding of their own lives. Further, Bobkina and Stefanova state that a

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interact with other students to communicate their interpretation of the text (680). By focusing on themes that are close to the students’ personal lives, in this instance the ambivalent

perceptions on surveillance with its pros and cons, Nineteen Eighty-Four can serve this purpose, if handled well by the teacher. Bobkina and Stefanova also argue that it is expected of pupils to develop skills that will help them to understand implied or hidden meaning, apply what they have learnt to other aspects of their life, and separate facts from opinions (680). By using Nineteen Eighty-Four in the EFL classroom and discussing how surveillance is

portrayed, and how the inhabitants of Oceania react to the surveillance, the students would be given an outlet to reflect upon their own perceptions of surveillance, and how it affects them in their daily life. According to Beach and others, interpretations and understanding of a text must be linked to the students’ personal beliefs, attitudes, and their understanding of the world (121), and as shown by the analysis, students seem to have a basic understanding of how panoptic surveillance impacts the human psyche without having read Foucault. To create this link, however, it would be useful for the teacher to check both what surveillance techniques the students are aware of, and their attitudes towards them before introducing Nineteen

Eighty-Four to the EFL classroom. By organising the students’ reflections and providing them with examples that they might not have thought about themselves, the teacher can provide a scaffold for the students to work from. As indicated by the limited research on students’ perceptions of surveillance, the teacher can expect their students to have an ambivalent stance on the pros and cons of surveillance. Surveillance, whether CCTV or dataveillance, is seen by students as a means of security, where the surveillance is interpreted to create a safer

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material regarding contemporary surveillance before and during the reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the teacher can create more awareness about the topic and further make the theme of surveillance portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four more relatable to the students. At the same time, the students would be encouraged to reflect upon the society of which they take part of. To further aid the students to reflect upon their own situation, the students would benefit from taking notes in a personal journal during their reading. By complementing a reading journal with questions focused on analysing why the plot turns out the way it does, provided by the teacher, we encourage critical thinking (Harmer 108-09). By doing this, the students’ reflections on the novel can create a basis for smaller oral discussions where the students share their thoughts on surveillance. This exercise would require the students to formulate and structure their own thoughts about the topic of surveillance both written and orally. This would give the students opportunities to develop the ability to adapt their

language to different purposes, recipients, and situations, and to develop the ability to reflect on living conditions, social issues, and cultural features of both their own and other societies (Natl. Ag f. Ed. 2). The students might also, by some degree, obtain greater knowledge on the topic and thus be more able to follow the discourse in news and politics, considering that both the Panopticon and George Orwell’s “Big Brother” have for a long time dominated the public discussion regarding surveillance.

5 Conclusion

The aim of this study has been to thematize upper secondary students’ perspectives on surveillance and privacy and to compare these with the perceived reactions to panoptic surveillance portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This has been done by juxtaposing these two viewpoints with Foucault’s discussion on the impact of the architectural structure of

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similar notions of concern are still upheld by upper secondary school students today as when Nineteen Four was first published in 1949. Consequently, this makes Nineteen Eighty-Four a steadfast text to use in the EFL classroom to help students deal with these issues, at the same time as it provides them with a greater understanding of contemporary discussions regarding surveillance and privacy.

Not much research has been done on students’ perception on surveillance, thus making the base upon which this thesis can stand fairly limited. However, the research that has been published all point in the same direction. Students from three different countries show similar reactions to surveillance. Many see it as a means of security, where surveillance is interpreted to create a safer environment. By being under constant surveillance, norm-braking behavior, such as acts of vandalism or violence, can be punished by the administration, which according to many students is a good thing. Simultaneously, the students may regard the same

surveillance as an infringement of their privacy. Overall, the research indicates that students seem to understand the basic concept of panopticism, i.e., how constant surveillance shape the behavior of the observed, as this paper has shown clear similarities between student’s

perception of surveillance and the panoptic surveillance portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also points to a gap between current knowledge and the knowledge required to form an informed opinion, as the students do not seem to be used to discussing this subject. By giving the students an opportunity to structure and reflect upon their thoughts regarding this subject in the EFL classroom, the teacher might give them the tool needed to lessen the

aforementioned gap and help the students develop their ability to reflect on living conditions, social issues, and cultural features of both their own and other societies.

Subsequently, by using Nineteen Eighty-Four as reading material in the EFL

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journal throughout the reading of Winston’s rebellion against Big Brother, the students would be given the opportunity to structure and formulate their thoughts. These notes can later be used as a basis for smaller oral discussions. A minor exercise like this would give the students an opportunity to develop the ability to adapt their language to different purposes and

situation, while the extensive reading would benefit the students’ overall learning of the target language.

For further research I would suggest more extensive studies on upper secondary school students’ perception of surveillance and how these can be challenged by using

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