Surveillance society

1. Big Brother and The Panopticon
2. Surveillance
3. Dataveillance
4. Monitoring and power
5. The People's Surveillance: Sousveillance and Social Surveillance
6. We're all (on) Big Brother now

Recommended Readings/Viewings

• Kietzmann, Jan and Ian Angell (2010) "Panopticon Revisited"
• Marwick, Alice E. (2012) “The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life." Surveillance & Society 9(4): 378-393.
• Radke, Nathan (2005) "Simveillance in Hyperreal Las Vegas," International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2(2). July 2005.
• Taber, Emily (2010) "Prisons of the Cruel Inner God: Neo-Panopticism in Contemporary Western Culture"
• Online Echo Chamber Checker (take the test if you have Twitter)

Key concepts, people, etc

• Panopticon
  A prison model in which cells are grouped around a central tower containing guards who can watch what the prisoners are doing, but the prisoners can't tell when they are being watched; this has become a metaphor for a world in which an individual feels paranoid and self-conscious because they may be being watched or recorded at any time
• Michel Foucault: Knowledge is power
  The idea that those who have special knowledge of you combined with institutional backing (doctors, lawyers, teachers) have power over you, even though the power is not physical or direct
  
• Four different kinds of "veillance" in the modern world
  Surveillance: public watching and recording, particularly by surveillance cameras; may also include government-sanctioned police surveillance, such as wire-taps
  Dataveillance: the recording and analysis of one's actions online and through electronic technology, for instance one's web browsing, cookies, clicks etc
  Sousveillance: the possibility of ordinary citizens to turn surveillance back on the authorities, for instance filming police brutality on one's smartphone
  Social surveillance: the possibility for ordinary people to stalk or analyze other people through their freely shared social media and online presences; can be used by authority figures to know more about a person than the professional relationship really calls for (eg, bosses, parents, or teachers watching a person's social media and making conclusions about the person based on their profile
• Surveillance Capitalism: one of the true social problems with dataveillance; companies can use data to target vulnerable communities with advertising as well as political influence
• Filter Bubbles/Echo Chambers: the other deep problem with dataveillance tailoring our feeds to give us more of what we want: we end up seeing less and less of the media that disagrees with us or shows us alternative views (or music etc!)

References

• Bentham, Jeremy (1995) The Panopticon Writings. London: Verso, 1995
• Bogard, William. (1996)  The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Brin, David (1990) Earth. Bantam Books.
• Foucault, Michel (1994) The Birth of the Clinic. Vintage Books, 1994
• Foucault, Michel (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.  Vintage Books, 1995
• Hirsh, Michael (2013) "How America's Top Tech Companies Created the Surveillance State," National Journal, 7/27/2013
• Giles, Jim. (2012) Secrets of your Stride.  New Scientist,  215(2883) 9/22/2012.
• Gohier, Philippe.  Worried?  Not Us.  Maclean's.  9/19/2011.  Vol. 124 Issue 36.
• Keller, John. (2013) "Intelligence researchers seek to make big improvements in biometric facial recognition," Military & Aerospace Electronics, July 1, 2013
• Kobie, Nicole (2019) "The complicated truth about China's social credit system," Wired, June 7, 2019.
• Morelli, Marie (2016) "3 myths about first presidential TV debate between Kennedy, Nixon," Syracuse.com.
• Thibault, Sebastien. (2019) "Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights," Amnesty International, 21 November 2019
• Tufekci, Zeynep (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas. Yale University Press.
• Zuboff, Shoshona (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile.