The Culture of Surveillance by David Lyon

Author:David Lyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

This chapter has explored some ways in which items that start life as attractive, even seductive, novelties end up contributing to a process of normalization of surveillance. In everyday life, people respond to surveillance as it is increasingly embedded in the contexts and routines of everyday life. The flagship of this process is the ubiquitous smartphone, but it is also evident in more abstract-sounding processes of smart city development, the internet of things and wearable devices in which communication between objects, and between objects and persons as well as between persons themselves, is creating new sorts of relationships between data and people.

One important way in which surveillance imaginaries and practices have taken on a new dimension is that they have become decidedly participatory. This is not to say that earlier forms of surveillance require no participation – you still have to be on the street for the camera to detect your presence or at airport security to have your bags and details checked, and to play your role. But today, participation is a much more obvious feature of surveillance – users know that their phones, wearables and other gadgets and platforms are interacting with their activities, even if they do not understand the extent of that interplay.

Participation has been noted here in several contexts beyond smartphones – facial recognition technology, building sensors, self-tracking devices, even semi-autonomous vehicles – but it is always negotiated between various actors whose intentions and actions still have to be explored and translated.59 This ‘participatory turn’, as Julie Cohen calls it,60 becomes even more evident in the world of social media and gaming that the following chapter explores. As yet, its implications are hard to understand by those involved with it, not least because the algorithms that guide their operation are opaque to users.

Conventional forms of surveillance, seen in national security or policing, are not generally associated with aesthetic pleasures and tend to elicit instead various kinds of caution and compliance. With the ongoing levels of innovation in new media, along with growing familiarity with everyday forms of baked-in surveillance, cultures of surveillance develop that are less anxious, often because they are consumer related and play on features such as convenience or conviviality. This means that they may themselves become quickly taken for granted as necessities for everyday living or that they may serve to domesticate aspects of more obviously law-and-order-producing surveillance.

But the key innovations of the twenty-first century, seen here in smartphones and social media, are associated with some deeper changes. On the one hand, so-called soft surveillance has some subtle ways of ensuring compliance, for instance through social sorting, that reduces the options open to consumers or users. And on the other, explored in the next chapter, is evidence that surveillance practices increasingly include more conscious complicity in our own surveillance and engaging in do-it-yourself surveillance. We look at each of these, and other aspects of participation, in the next chapter.

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