Consider the following comments on surveillance.
We behave best when watched and most ourselves when we forget we are.
The eye that never blinks does not protect you, it trains you.
I have nothing to hide is a sentence people only say before they understand the question.
Privacy is the room in which we rehearse who we are before we decide who to be.
We traded the fear of being unseen for the quieter fear of being seen always.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that being watched changes us before it ever catches us, and that the modern habit of living under constant observation, by cameras, by algorithms, by each other, quietly edits the self we are willing to show. Open with a particular experience of being watched, the performance that creeps in when a phone records, the careful version of yourself that appears online. Then explore the tension: surveillance can feel like safety and accountability, yet the same gaze that keeps us honest can also keep us small, pruning the odd, private, experimental parts of a person. A useful structural move contrasts the self that exists when truly alone with the curated self that surfaces under observation. Caution: avoid the paranoid conclusion that all watching is sinister, since to be seen is also to be known and loved, and the harder question is which gazes set us free and which ones shrink us.