Surveillance and the redefinition of individuals and reality (original) (raw)
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Surveillance, Mass Culture and the Subject: A Systems/Lifeworld Approach
Theory of Communicative Action provides distinct advantages for considering both the evolving character of surveillance within the context of late capitalism, and related changes to human subjectivity and culture. In particular, the concepts systems, lifeworld and colonization may be employed to identify key threats to democratic life within information-based, consumer-driven societies. Many recent social theoretical approaches to the study of surveillance emphasize the entanglement of human subjectivity with "electronic language" and computer-based practices of personal data gathering and profiling. One result is that conscious, embodied, human subjects are often not treated as potentially significant agents of progressive social change. Alternatively, Habermas makes a methodological distinction between the impersonal workings of administrative and economic systems, and the lifeworld of communally shared experience. This allows for critical attention to the potentially negative social/cultural effects of commercial surveillance practices, while preserving a role for rational human actors.
Agency in the Era of Mass Surveillance
This project seeks to investigate the influence surveillance has on agency and actions of the individual, through an analysis of Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour including interviews, debates and trials regarding the subject matter. Theories creating the framework for the project are Foucault’s Panopticism, in addition to his Subject and Power and Richard Bernstein’s text Praxis and Action, which aims to portray Hegel and Marx’ understanding of the principle regarding the master & slave- dialectic. By examining the interplay between individual agency and government forces, we discovered that these entities are interdependent and that one must investigate government forces as a result of initial individual agency, and that these cannot be seen as two binary positions. However, the mass surveillance carried out by agents within government forces, mainly as a result of economic interests, leads to a self-disciplining practice among individuals, transversed throughout the social body of society. We argue that technology facilitates mass surveillance extensively, making it a constitutional factor of modern society. However, there are still possible existing options to battle these enforced structures from within.
Surveillance and identity Towards a new anthropology of the person
Paper presented at the BSA conference, 2007
In the last decades surveillance and security tools, from cctv to ID cards, have grown to unpredictable levels. From close spaces, such as airports and malls, to urban contexts, our identities have become mere physical features constantly monitored by the penetrating eyes of security devices. The complexity, the nuances and the essential social components of identity are often reduced to ascribed characteristics. Identities have turned into "transparent" and naked bodies, legitimately scrutinised and divided into "pieces". This simplistic approach could lead either to social exclusion of ethnic groups usually associated with deviant behaviour, or to a more general lack of concern for the integrity and the dignity of the person as a whole. The paper aims at analysing this new and inadequate anthropology of the person by focusing on different examples, such as biometrics and data banks, that emphasise the fragmentation of the body and the risks related to this reductive approach. In particular, the paper describes the outcomes of a qualitative research carried out in the cctv operators control rooms in the city of Milan. My 70 hours observation study has found that the operators mostly monitor ethnic groups (i.g. North-Africans and East Europeans) on the basis of an a priori stigma. In addiction, due to the fact that the majority of the operators are male, women's body is more exposed to the not always discreet electronic gaze.
In the last few years several artistic projects have been inspired by surveillance practices and the social processes they capture. In the same way that Surveillance Studies have debated the differences between different forms of counter-surveilllance, many of these projects offer different understandings of what it means to recreate, co-opt or expose surveillance, and so they relate to surveillance in different ways. By selecting six of these art projects and looking at what they say about power, technology and agency, this paper uses art as a stepping stone to explore questions that remain open in the academic debate -what does it mean to subvert the surveillance society? What are the differences between recreation, co-option and exposure when raising awareness of the day-to-day aspects of the surveillance society? By looking at different surveillance-related artistic projects and the issues they raise, this paper explores how counter surveillance, sousveillance, privacy and data protection have been presented in artistic practices, and mirrors them against recurring themes and arguments in Surveillance Studies. While most academic debates are based on academic contributions, this paper brings new insights into the current state of Surveillance Studies using artistic practices and the reflections they bring about as a starting point, to find surprising similarities between these two perspectives –and their current shortcomings.
Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life
Surveillance has become a crucial component of all environments informed or enabled by ICTs. Equally, almost all surveillance practices in technologically 'advanced' societies are enhanced and amplified by ICTs. Surveillance is understood as any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control. Thus in addition to those who may be 'suspects' (because of alleged offences), ordinary persons in everyday lifeworkers, consumers, citizens, travellers --find that their personal data are of interest to others. Agencies process personal data in order to calculate risks or to predict opportunities, classifying and profiling their records routinely. While everyday life may thus seem less 'private', and ordinary people may feel that they are more vulnerable to intrusion, the use of searchable databases for categorizing and profiling means that deeper questions of power are involved. Life chances and choices are affected -sometimes negatively -by the judgments made on the basis of concatenated data, which means that such surveillance is implicated in basic questions of social justice, to do with access, risk distribution and freedom. There is increased need for ethics and politics of information in an era of intensifying surveillance.
LOCATING SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY IN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM OF THOUGHTS
Vidyabharati International Interdisciplinary Research Journal (Special Issue), 2021
The technological explosion of Covid-19 era and the subsequent increase in the dependence on surveillance technology has amplified the privacy and surveillance debate. To a large extent the current sensibilities appear to present the debate as a contest between surveillance and privacy, driven by the presumption (both in popular and academic circles) that surveillance is either an aberration or antithetical of privacy. This segregation of surveillance and privacy misses two significant points. One, on a discursive level privacy and surveillance share the genealogical trajectories as both operates within the larger system of informational control. Second, surveillance, like privacy is an abstract notion and could only be understood under the condition and the context in which it operates. This article argues that the ideals of privacy and surveillance as professed and practiced are deeply entrenched in the institutional structure of capitalism, which rather than segregating, necessitates a certain kind of mutuality between the two. Furthermore, in this paper we explore how privacy protection is not the counter to surveillance, rather how both co-exist in the Capitalist discourse and how individuals participate in it
The Surveillance, the Control and Invisible Violence
The encrypted signals, the artificial intelligence, all gadgets and electronic mechanisms, in some way, put humanity in its dependence. Insofar as that, the advances converge to a utopia not performed in its fullness, the man heading towards his disappearance as a leading man and the individual lends his physical body and, in exchange, increasingly wraps the meandering of technological paraphernalia. The present paper has as objective, build a thought about the individualization and invisible violence in the context of surveillance and control, taking the body as its largest distinctive sign. The latent visibility into our society literally sees in the speed of gadgets your biggest indicator, the social draining and made the territorial extensions were abolished and with a push of a button, the communication is performed. The local site is completely protected. The surveillance is controlled by cameras in the distance. The death of the body is declared, as far as it virtualizes. The world around does not exist but there is no physical interaction. Natural elements are no longer available, and everything is measured by the interrelation of virtual bidders. The immateriality becomes spectrum and in this relationship it is more important that the contact in itself. What may have happened to the physical contact? Lost in time or shrunk by electronic devices that run on marketing, there are virtually no more. The bodies do not interact and superficiality takes account of family and business meetings. The meetings are lost to the distancing; the "des-Virtual meetings" are more "alive". It is the life, which takes away the technological few and offers opportunities, which supposedly we believe to be important. In this condition, humanity walks for its retrenchment and oblivionism that, before was only remote, appears with force and puts us in a condition never before imagined with the loss of the senses. Create devices to provide security for persons with lightning speed, as if this condition would be able to control and maintain the social order, which has been imposed upon us a subtle and poetic by sweetie advertisements, but fierce, is betting as being the redemption and the solution to all the problems and the evils of humanity. Connect and be connected without interruption, represents security up to where the limit allowed. The existing violence and foggy, confronted with the social dislocation that cannot be measured as behavior assigned to a society. This bond conditions, is in anyway, always raised discussions as being curtailed and deprivation. However, when it becomes a common and asks that we be free through the surveillance cameras, chip cards and mobile phones, shows in fact that we are trapped and most of the times we accept this condition. Who make a profit? People, businesses of technologies that develop gadgets, promising results with its discarded products and outdated? To feed this technological race, people prepares all day a way to sell more things that each time we need less. Is this the key to discontent and sense of freedom that both seek since ancient times? To be free, we must deprive of choice or at least be tied to anchors who owns the capital. The central proposal is, understand how the body fits in this context, in which the power exerts safety function, in that war daily by a piece of people that are sold, as by-products, to which the companies of consumption may in some way to offer the most diverse products. The pocket or the body is who pays the price of the technology to the extent that the invisible violence is bypassed or arbitrarily presented as trivial. In this panorama, not distinguished accuser and accused, and we can only redeem what remains of the crumbs scattered. Big Dates, museums, image files and of monitoring data to preserve a society that prefers to archive to live. What is the participation of this body, in a society that walks, to the disappearance, toward the virtual in its fullness? In this sense, thinking body, is thinking sensorial dimensions and in virtual the sensorium is unsettled by complete and cadenced according to who has the absolute power. The downtime and the sedation behind of bunkers residential brings the denial of the body as productive agent. The inertia of the will pulse is stagnation of life and social agent, insofar as the disappearance of the body is inevitable. In a world plagued by speculations about surveillance, power and control, this research is based on authors who recommend reading and more in-depth reflections about this proposed theme. Some of the authors who contribute more directly and significantly to this thesis are Virilio (1998), Bauman (2001), Rüdiger (2002), Lyon (1994) and Trivinho (2007), who sought to study the impact of digital technologies on social life. On the other hand, Castells (1999), Bourdieu (1999) and Foucault (1979) analyze the condition of surveillance and control, ranging from the social to the technological domain. Wiener (1978) analyzed the developments in society marked by cybernetics. As early as the 1970s, other and equally important authors, such as Toynbee (1971), identified the technological power wielded by companies. In more recent times, authors such as Postman (1993) and Julian Assange (2012) – the latter is one of the most emblematic examples – stated that the technological condition is favorable to the one who wields power, since the rules are not egalitarian. Nevertheless, although ordinary users demand privacy, governments and corporations violate this condition in order to exercise strict control over them. In fact, for the microsphere of power, information must be crystal clear to enable the maintenance of surveillance of people.
Self, Surveillance, and Society
The Sociological Quarterly, 2002
There is much to admire about Thomas Voire. At a time when many contemporary observers express concern about increasing crime rates, an economic downturn, xenophobia, and political apathy, Tom is presented as a law-abiding and hard-working citizen. We do not use the word "citizen" lightly. Born in 1966, Tom has lived peaceably, stayed gainfully employed, served his country, explored non-US. cultures in libraries and museums, and, most laudably, demonstrated a willingness to articulate and defend nationally cherished and constitutionally protected personal freedoms. In Thomas Voire, Gary T. Marx provides us with an archetype of the postmodern democratic maneducated, tolerant, worldly, and a staunch believer in equality under the law.
Ideology, Critique and Surveillance
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2013
The 2013 revelations concerning global surveillance programmes demonstrate in unprecedented clarity the need for Critical Theory of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address the mechanisms and implications of increasingly global, ubiquitous surveillance. This is all the more urgent because of the dominance of the "surveillance ideology" (the promise of security through surveillance) that supports the political economy of surveillance. This paper asks which theoretical arguments and concepts can be useful for philosophically grounding a critique of this surveillance ideology. It begins by examining how the surveillance ideology works through language and introduces the concept of the 'ideological packaging' of ICTs to show how rhetoric surrounding the implementation of surveillance technologies reinforces the surveillance ideology. It then raises the problem of how ideology-critique can work if it relies on language itself and argues that Martin Heidegger's philosophy can make a useful contribution to existing critical approaches to language.