Visibility & Dignity
Intuitively, we know that visibility is important. We all want to be seen.
As designer and leadership expert Keith Yamashita said recently,
“What are the synonyms for love? You know, it’s being seen.”
As school leaders and as human beings, we know this to be deeply true. We may know, too, how painful it is to be invisible, to have our contributions overlooked or erased.
But recently I have wondered, if visibility is so important, why is it sometimes so comforting to be in spaces where you can be invisible?
When I lived in Philadelphia, the streets and public spaces there were generous in letting everyone there just “be,” all of us going about our business in relative anonymity. Nobody much cared what we were wearing, where we were coming from, or where we were headed. I remember Questlove saying a few years ago that he just liked to ride the subways for hours on end when he goes back to Philly. Anonymity can be healthy and welcome, a kind of freedom.
So I started to think about other factors that make visibility and anonymity attractive, or not. Like trust:
Low trust isn’t necessarily bad by itself—we don’t know all the people we meet in a concert, in the airport, on a subway. Strangers and neighbors can live peacefully with low visibility and moderate amounts of trust. Having high visibility and high trust is always a safe area—you want your democratically elected leaders to be trustworthy, and visible, and transparent. However, low trust (and and even more, active distrust) combined with high visibility is fertile ground for suspicion, scapegoating, and surveillance. More on that below.
The other thing I realized is that visibility also has a time component.
Generally speaking, it feels good to have your visibility go up over time. You enter a new high school, summer camp, or grad program, and get to know people and get to be known by the community. That’s a good thing. In your work, you want your colleagues and supervisors to see what you’re capable of. As a student, you enjoy when the school recognizes what you can do.
But what if you’ve been at your job for a few years, and with a change in leadership, your contributions are no longer seen as valuable, or recognized? This certainly happens to students too—coming back from summer break to realize that your classmates are no longer interested in the same things, no longer invite you to join them, no longer laugh at the things they found so witty just a few months ago. All of this feels bad.
Besides trust and time, there’s another factor in visibility that we should think about. That is, how mutual is the visibility?
For visibility to be healthy, It also matters how mutual it is. With your close friends, you have high visibility; they see you clearly, and you see them clearly in return. If you’re just classmates or coworkers, it’s fine to have high mutuality but lower visibility—a new class starts and nobody knows much about each other, and that’s fine. And if visibility is low but mutuality is low, that seems acceptable too—your neighbors in your new neighborhood might know a little about who you are before you know them, and generally this isn’t problematic. But in the high visibility / low mutuality area seems more dangerous. This is an area where surveillance lives: red light cameras, predictive analytics, and credit agencies and ad agencies collecting and exchanging data about you.
Modern nation states and markets move in this quadrant as well. As the political scientist and anthropologist James Scott has pointed out, modern states and markets strive to make people visible (or “legible” in his phrasing) by simplifying their individual complexity into broad categories. “Surnames were imposed [by nation states] to keep track of individuals and to tax them; the streets of [Hausmann’s] Paris were redesigned to make individuals easier to control.”1 These invented categories helped bureaucratic efficiency, but inevitably removed much of the tacit knowledge, variability, and uniqueness of people in these categories.
Today, algorithms also put us all into categories, even as we pay our bills, listen to music, find our way from one place to another, connect with friends online, and so on. On the one hand, these algorithmic categories may be more fine-tuned than the categories of the past (just think about Netflix’s recommendation engine, or Spotify’s), but still we usually don’t know how these algorithms are actually built, nor understand fully how they might be used. We know that there are many examples of algorithmic bias, and that end-users of technology often are unaware of the categories they are placed in, and how that might be affecting their use of the software/platform.
All of this should make us ask, “To whom are we visible? And with what dignity?”
This question is relevant for us on technology platforms, whether we are consumers on commercial platforms or as citizens on government platforms. It also needs to be asked in relation to new technologies such as “smart cities.” And of course, as school leaders, we need to ask these questions of the data systems that we create and manage.
In our school dashboards and systems, how are students and faculty visible, and with what dignity?
In their recent book, Street Data, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan suggest we can’t fulfill the promises of equity and deep learning in our schools without this “street data,” i.e., qualitative, experiential data, that honor the assets and all of the tacit knowledge of each person.
Stanford education professor Antero Garcia is getting at a similar point when he makes a distinction of seeing people on a surface level—seeing to confirm our existing ideas—versus a deeper sensing, in this beautiful short reflection:
“How do we open ourselves up to sensing beyond the taken-for-granted in our fieldwork, in our classrooms, and in our day-to-day interactions?”
As humans we are both those who know and those who want to be known, those who see and those who want to be seen. Those who speak, albeit imperfectly, and those who want to be heard—and to listen to others better. As Rowan William writes in his recent piece on Dostoevsky:
“If we truly share a capacity (a destiny?) as beings who speak to each other, we must always attend to how we are heard; we must imagine our own voices in the ears of another. In that moment, we understand that we owe it to one another to make every voice heard, to be responsible for securing the freedom of the voice of the other and the stranger.”
As we attend to visibility in our organizations, to seeing better, we are confronted personally with visibility’s inevitable human complexity. The task is large, we are finite, and so we want the efficiency of tools and systems; but we also need to hold ourselves accountable that others will truly be seen and heard. To design and redesign systems for visibility and dignity, and to lead and manage for these ends, we need an active, sharp, and humane kind of care—not just technical proficiency and pedigree. We need an empathy that is both patient and persistent.
If you want to know more about how MakeKnowledge incorporates these ideas into our work with schools—designing dashboards for climate action, tools for student reflection and growth, and consulting on strategy, please reach out: info (at) makeknowledge.org.
quoted in “The Moral Economy of High Tech Modernism,” by Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade.