Slashdot Mirror
Eat, Drink, and be Monitored
Ponca City, We Love You writes "A new restaurant has opened at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, fitted with a control center and two dozen hidden cameras devoted to exploring the question of what makes people eat and drink the way they do. Over the next 10 years, a team of more than 20 scientists will use the research facility to watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away. Researchers will examine environmental influences on eating behavior by making small changes in the color of the lights, in accompanying sounds, in the scents or the furniture. "We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel," said one researcher. "This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse." University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant will have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched."
Yes there is a sign on the door...
Having the experience of living in the Netherlands as foreigner for the last 5 years or so, I can tell you that the tolerance and support for surveillance in this country is scary. Very scary.
It comes AFAIK from a tradition of religious control, where people's lives were very closely followed by the religious. Go to any village in this country, and you will only see houses with huge windows and without curtains.
Nowadays everybody supports more cameras in the street.
This country has a culture of peer monitoring of behaviour, and peer "active" enforcing of acceptable behaviour (normally through the waving of a censoring finger, while preaching). Everybody watches everybody, and everyone will point in a censor-like way, to anyone not acting normally. This is no joke. The saying is "act normally" ("Doet normaal!"), for anyone doing anything nor conforming to "morally & socially" approved behaviour.
I could go on... but I better not.