Technologies of Vision by Anderson Steve F

Author:Anderson, Steve F. [Anderson, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: media studies; culture; new media; photography; digital; film; technoculture
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Frenzy of the Digital

The history of cultural anxieties surrounding communication technologies may be traced back even further than these cinematic examples from the prehistory of personal computing. A useful comparison can be made with television at its moment of emergence in the early 1950s. In Lynn Spigel’s survey of cultural responses to domestic television found in women’s magazines, Make Room for TV (1992), she highlights a 1954 issue of Good Housekeeping, in which readers were advised to cover their television screens at night in an “attempt to ‘screen out’ television’s visual field, to manage vision in the home so that people could see without being seen.” Spigel remarks, “The new TV eye threatens to turn back on itself, to penetrate the private window and to monitor the eroticized fantasy life of the more sadistic aspects of television technology; television now becomes an instrument of surveillance.”26 It is easy to dismiss the image of 1950s housewives covering their TV screens at night, but who among us would welcome public scrutiny of all our electronic traces in digital space? In a post-Snowden age, Hollywood’s once seemingly hyperbolic vision of sentient computers forcing us to stand naked before them may be rescripted as prescient warning rather than paranoid fantasy.

While Good Housekeeping’s admonishment may seem naïve, we should remember that the Bush administration’s original concept for Operation TIPS would have enlisted cable TV installers to spy on their customers, marking a human rather than a technological vector by which the apparatus of television might indeed “look back” at its viewers. As recently as June 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to covering his laptop’s camera and microphone with tape as a last line of defense against unwanted surveillance, prompting a New York Times headline to advise, “You Should Consider It, Too.”27 A year earlier, Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung was compelled to acknowledge the possibility that its line of Smart TVs could capture potentially private information via its voice recognition system. Shortly after the product launch, Samsung responded to public concerns by issuing a supplement to its privacy policy for the devices in February 2015, which read, “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.” The statement was widely reported as an admission by Samsung of the potential for incidental capture of personal data, and by mid-March, the company had removed the statement from its privacy policy in the interests of clarifying what actually happens with its voice recognition system, though no modification to the technology or its operations was reported.28

A more prosaic—but also more ubiquitous—form of self-surveillance is found in the tablet and mobile devices regularly carried by a majority of twenty-first-century Americans. Mobile devices make us both tracker and tracked, not only through the cameras that reverse the gaze of the screen—and that are susceptible to remote activation without a user’s knowledge—but through data exchanged in real time between mobile applications and remote servers.

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