Just finished reading a thought-provoking piece by Anders Albrechtslund entitled Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance.
The abstract, by Albrechtslund:
“In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful — what I call participatory surveillance.”
This is a powerful piece, and worth a read.
Historically, I think many of us think of “surveillance” as something that is done by a more powerful authority to an individual who is comparatively less powerful. One of the classic examples of this is the concept of the Panopticon, a prison where a single watcher could observe the actions and activities of a great number of individuals.
However, Albrechtslund argues that (perhaps not unlike a subjugated group taking back derogatory words) online social networking has the possibility to enable a new type of peer-to-peer “surveillance” that is actually empowering to individuals. He writes:
“As mentioned earlier, a hierarchical conception of surveillance represents a power relation which is in favor of the person doing the surveillance. The person under surveillance is reduced to a powerless, passive subject under the control of the “gaze.”
[Koskela] introduces the concept of ’empowering exhibitionism’ to describe the practice of revealing your (very) personal life. By exhibiting their lives, people claim ‘copyright’ to their own lives, as they engage in the self-construction of identity. This reverts the vertical power relation, as visibility becomes a tool of power that can be used to rebel against the shame associated with not being private about certain things. Thus, exhibitionism is liberating, because it represents a refusal to be humble. Many amateur exhibitionism examples can be found on sites like Nu Bay, with both parties fully consenting of course.
Online social networking can also be empowering for the user, as the monitoring and registration facilitates new ways of constructing identity, meeting friends and colleagues as well as socializing with strangers. This changes the role of the user from passive to active, since surveillance in this context offers opportunities to take action, seek information and communicate.”
So what does this mean? This means that, as our offline and online lives become increasingly intertwined and networked, the more open we are, the more individual power we have.
What I’m now wrestling with is how this plays at the place where organizations, employees, and customers meet.
Remember, in a networked world, we all play different roles at different times — employee, customer, company representative, parent, friend, person. And everyone with whom we interact does the same thing. We are all creators, and all watchers. Perhaps the more we create, and the more we connect, the more say we have in our own futures.
Related: ArtTartare
photos: 3blindmice and wikipedia
cross-posted to the conversation hub.
interesting indeed.
your last statement here has gotten me thinking.
it is true that action-reaction or cause-effect could be used, in limited form, to describe some of how our ideals, ideas, intentions etc propagate to shape our external reality.
how does our external reality then function though? does it mislead us based on what we perceive to be “known”?
issac newton, said it well as he cast a stone into the ocean and stated something along the lines “this is what i know (stone), that is what is (ocean).”
certainly an understanding of anything in limited scope misleads. especially if these nuggets of information are viewed as a central dogma in understanding our reality.
we are constantly bombarded by information. what to wear, eat, what is healthful, what is not, what illnesses you might have, who is beautiful etc.
unfortunately, these are constructing our glass house.
you say: “perhaps the more we create, and the more we connect, the more say we have in our own futures.”
i could not agree more. lets create, connect, and actively participate in our information feeds.
reminds me of my most recent post on “Yuk! Fossil Fuels.” our solutions have been apparent, but have just begun to rippled our reality enough to spawn our own empowerment.
check it out at:
“Healing Space with Todd Pesek, MD”
http://www.healingspaceblog.com
be well,
todd
Jeremhy Bentham, father of the Panopticon, specifically intended that the prisoners there internalize the gaze of their guards (whom they intentionally could not see, so they could never know when they specifically were under direct surveillance). Beyond refusal to be humble, an open online presence amounts to refusal to do that violence of self-censorship. At the same time, it gives a nudge to those who would like to censor others that they might find better uses of their time.
Hi Chris, some of this ground was covered at London’s Digital Identity Forum last November. An interesting term I heard used there was sousveillance (those who were under surveillance now turning the camera back on the surveyors)
I am having difficulty endorsing the empancipatory rhetoric of social networking sites and certainly do not agree with the idea that we own the copyright to our identities which we are actively creating online. Facebook’s contested policy of ownership in perpetuity strikes me as an obvious example of the site specific limitations of empanicapatory self-expression and creation. See “The Valorization of Surveillance:
Towards a Political Economy of Facebook by Nicole S. Cohen:
“Much excitement surrounds Facebook, the social networking site based on user-generated content that has attracted 64 million active users since its inception in 2004. This paper begins to outline
a political economy of Facebook in an attempt to draw attention to the underlying economic relations that structure the website, and the way in which the site fits into larger patterns of contemporary capitalist development. Although Web 2.0 has presented a shift away from “old” top-down media models, there remains continuity through change: Facebook continues familiar
models of extensive commodification, with surveillance playing a key role in this process. The emerging reliance on general intellect and free labour for the purpose of capital accumulation does represent a move away from a more passive conception of the audience commodity, yet it demonstrates the continuous march of
capitalism into cyberspace under post-Fordist conditions.”
I am interested in the counter-hegemonic and libratory (fun, too) possiblities of social networking but need to think more on the push and pull of these techno-social spaces. Another obvious concern is the state’s mining of social networking sites for “terrorists” which requires gathering of data on many “normal” people who are interacting on these sites.
Jason Ethier of Northeastern University discusses the Scalable Social Network Analysis Program developed by the Information Awareness Office:
The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people … In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.
Althought Albrechtslund’s idea is compelling at some levels, I prefer the idea of sousveillance.
from wiki-
Sousveillance (IPA: [suːˈveɪləns], original French [suvɛjɑ̃s]) as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,[1] typically by way of small portable or wearable recording devices that often stream continuous live video to the Internet.
Inverse surveillance is a proper subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on “watchful vigilance from underneath” and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance, and may thus be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology study (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance).
just some quick thoughts….