Week 12: On the Changing Landscape of Surveillance

Here I go aging myself again. This was a hit song of my teen years during the 80s, it's theme of surveillance most likely appealing to listeners around the world for various reasons. During that period for me, my fears about surveillance were limited to

(1) house windows, due to break ins that were on the rise at the time, possibly the byproduct of an emerging drug transport culture which prompted my parents' installation of burglar bars in. every. window. of my childhood home (no one could get in, but we certainly could not get out);

(2) the rotary dial telephone situated in our kitchen, the portal through which creeps and weirdos (okay, maybe my high school friends) breathed heavily - or not at all - into the static-filled line, prompting exasperated screams - WHO IS THIS! STOP CALLING MY HOUSE! THIS ISN'T FUNNY!; or of course,

(3) the American imported fear of being surveilled and stabbed by a stranger in the shower, Psycho style, a movie referenced in the video which had recently been re-released on the then new VHS tape technology of the 80s. My big brother, having acquired a copy, permitted me to watch with him in the family living room, along with his girlfriend, both 'adults' completely oblivious to the effects such a film may have on the 13 year old mind they were charged with babysitting. Ahh good times!

The modes of surveillance referred to above can perhaps be encompassed in "the vertical conceptions and practices of surveillance in previous historical epochs, in which the sovereign monitors the subjects" (Scott, 2016, p.1), though, in the examples provided, the monitors were sovereign only figuratively, specifically in their ability to control the monitored through perceived fear and an elusive anonymity. Nevertheless, traditional iterations of surveillance were also emerging in The Bahamas at that time, with the installation of cameras at local banks and other places of business in an effort to stem rising rates of crime, specifically armed robberies.

Today, advances in technological surveillance are demonstrated in the use of more precise instruments, like a police used app called Shot Spotter, designed to pin point the exact location of any gunfire on the island, with accompanying video. How the general Bahamian public gained access to the app's functionality in a particularly violent shooting that went viral earlier in the year I cannot say for sure:

However, the circulation of the video, the property of the agents of surveillance, amongst the surveilled speaks to the blurring of the lines between the two and correlates to the "horizontal expansion of surveillant vision" that Scott Sundvall (2016) describes in his article "The Rhetoric of Desiring-Surveillance." The video leaves me with the question, who wanted that violence to be "seen" and why? Has murder now become a distorted form of entertainment rooted in this desire to see everything? While the video itself and the fire-cracking noise of the gunshots are devoid of any human presence, the video's emotional detachment is punctuated by the sound of a single howling dog who inadvertently alerts viewers that this is indeed a live recording, in a real neighborhood, of a human being that has been gunned down in real time by 15 rounds of ammunition.

Sundvall (2016) explains that this current age of electracy, in which social media fulfills people's "first and foremost desire to see others and to be seen by others" - which he coins "desiring-surveillance" - reflects the horizontal movement of information that is distinct from the vertical movement of information in top down surveillance models of previous eras (p. 2). The fear of privacy invasion captured in Rockwell's song is no longer a real concern in this era, as we are quite comfortable "observing ourselves being observed" (Foucault, as cited in Sundvall, 2016, p. 4). Sundvall argues that this "marks a shift from Being to Beseen" (Sundvall, 2016, p.8).

So, have we now become human beseens? I wonder if we have not always been so, but the digital medium simply allows EVERYONE to be fully seen in all of our brunch eating, vacation taking, election result venting glory. Think about it - amongst the highest paid people in the world, historically, are those who have been "seen" on a large scale: think movie stars, pop singers, top performing athletes and super models. What about the beliefs we hold? They too put us at the center of being seen and surveilled. God, for example, resides in heaven, "up high," surveilling all of creation. Ancestors "look down" on us to offer guidance, protection (and cooking skills, apparently):

We even teach our children that Santa Claus "knows when we are sleeping and knows when we are awake." I think our greatest secret might be that we find a certain degree of comfort in being surveilled. But let's say we do not - is it even possible to break free from ubicomp's surveillance in modern times?

Thomas Stubblefield's article on the disappearance of "Peter Bergmann," a John Doe of sorts who effectively eliminated his digital footprint WITH the assistance of surveillance cameras before his mysterious death seems to suggest so. How he uses a kind of digital camouflage to "disappear through or into the image of surveillance" (Stubblefield, 2016, p. 2), thereby achieving the inverse of desire-surveillance, is a fascinating read in "How to Disappear Completely (Into Surveillance Video)." In contrast, and perhaps, counterintuitively, removing self completely from the possibility of surveillance by, for instance, becoming a recluse, may not be an effective method of breaking free from surveillance, as seen in the case of the North Pond Hermit, also covered in Stubblefield's article. The hermit who burglarized nearby homes for years undetected, Christopher Knight, reported that solitude increased his perception of self, but that he lost his identity in the process: "With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant . . . I didn’t even have a name" (Stubblefield, 2016, p. 6).

His remarks remind me of that age old question, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? A new question may be, if I engage in any activity and didn't write a single post about it, did I really even do it? As it relates to social media, the irony in all of this is twofold: firstly, we are primarily engaged in the curation of our images to create the "brand" of ourselves that we wish to portray, and, secondly, our patent complaint of lack of privacy in this era as it relates to surveillance's connection to data mining and capitalism is liable to become victim to the "double bind" Sundvall references, which occurs when the form of surveillance that we claim to detest is the very thing that affords us the thing that we most desire - to be seen (Sundvall, 2016, p. 16).

Find the articles referred to and read more about surveillance below: http://mediafieldsjournal.org/issue-11-surveillance-states/