1
Crucibles of Culture

Today’s emerging surveillance culture takes place in a process of social-technological ‘melting’ which, as it intensifies, is creating something new. Hence, ‘crucibles of culture’. The liquefying metaphor speaks of changing relationships, both interpersonal and political,1 and the contents of the crucibles themselves, of a novel mixing of elements – the technosocial – that portend some unprecedented outcomes. It has become possible to do and say things, using technology, that would have been unthinkable only a generation ago.

For instance, as a Pew study shows, ‘Not only can internet searchers type in queries about someone who has aroused their curiosity, they also can seek pictures, videos, and real-time status updates online.’ Here is do-it-yourself surveillance. The researchers go on, ‘Location-based awareness in mobile devices adds another layer of information that can be searched.’ But immediately, they also expose the other face of the coin: ‘Avid users of mobile devices may voluntarily reveal their identity and location to certain websites, thereby allowing almost anyone to learn their whereabouts.’2 Ordinary users watching others, surveillantly, and also providing the data for such surveillance.

This quote propels us directly into surveillance culture territory. It speaks of everyday roles in relation to surveillance. It is mistaken to see surveillance today simply as something that is ‘done to us’; surveillance is experienced and also initiated by ordinary users. Many people do surveillance themselves, sometimes relying on complex technology to do so. The Pew report also points out that facial recognition technology is now commonplace in social media platforms, permitting some to engage in online identification of strangers. Non-visual identification is also easier for everyone, not just for corporations or police. Indeed, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 87 per cent of Americans could be identified with just three bits of information: gender, zip – or postal – code and date of birth.3

Once thought of mainly as the world of private investigators, police and security agencies, the means of surveillance now also flow freely through many media into the hands of the general public. This has helped to create an emerging surveillance culture – the everyday webs of social relations, including shared assumptions and behaviours, existing among all actors and agencies associated with surveillance. The symbolic and the material work together here, creating what is quickly becoming a significant dimension of social life. The culture of surveillance is about how surveillance is enabled not only by technical and political means but also by the enthusiasm, ignorance, and sometimes reluctant cooperation and even initiative-taking of the surveilled.

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework for considering the culture of surveillance. To grasp what is happening in the surveillance world today means extending our understanding of surveillance beyond common phrases such as ‘state surveillance’ or ‘surveillance society’ to think about the mundane ways in which surveillance has become an aspect of everyday lives. To achieve this, the concepts of ‘surveillance imaginaries’ and ‘surveillance practices’ are introduced, elaborated and placed in the context of a world of increasingly ‘liquid surveillance’.

It is not just that daily lives are recorded, monitored and tracked in unprecedented ways, though this rings true. It is that in a culture of surveillance, everyday life routines themselves have an enlarged role in constituting surveillance, particularly through so-called interactivity, that is, through user-generated surveillance. Surveillance has become part of a way of seeing and of being in the world. It is a dimension of a whole way of life.

Today, surveillance is frequently fluid and flexible, in contrast to previous solid and fixed forms, and this resonates with the more liquid modernities of the present. Surveillance works at a distance in both space and time, channelling flows of data and sorting people socially. However, surveillance operates increasingly in consensual ways, dependent on how people perceive and act in relation to surveillance. These surveillance ‘imaginaries’ and ‘practices’ constitute each other; imaginaries provide the sense of what living with surveillance entails, while the practices enable actual initiation, compliance, negotiation or resistance to occur.

Once perceived as a peripheral aspect of life, limited to recognizable suspects or persons-of-interest, surveillance has become central to social experience, both as a serious security issue and as a playful part of mediated relationships. In the mid-twentieth century, many thought of government monitoring as ‘state surveillance’ of an Orwellian kind. In the later twentieth century, the language of ‘surveillance society’ was popularized, referring to a general social experience of cameras in public space capturing street scenes, or loyalty cards tracking spending habits and creating customer profiles.

Here, these concepts are rethought in the light of how surveillance becomes a way of life, a way of ‘seeing’ and ‘being in’ the world. Surveillance still happens in government, policing, intelligence and commerce and is hard-wired into streets and buildings, wirelessly present in smartphones and via internet platforms. It has also been democratized for mass participation through social media. Surveillance cultures emerge more obviously than ever as surveillance becomes more flexible and fluid, touching more frequently the routines of everyday life. Liquid surveillance seeps and streams everywhere.

In what follows, the characteristics of surveillance culture are pulled into focus. But this process is itself dynamic and constantly changing. Some conceptual clues are offered in this chapter, but these ways of seeing are themselves affected by the phenomenon that confronts us. Starting with the notion of cultural ‘liquidity’ is a way of warning that the solidity and stasis of some previous perspectives on social and cultural life are not what they were. I then explain the concepts of imaginaries and practices, each of which suggests movement and mutation.

Liquidity and surveillance culture

Liquid surveillance connects surveillance with major movements within modernity. For Bauman, who popularized the notion of modern ‘liquidity’, all social forms seem subject to melting and surveillance is no exception.4 From once being more solid and fixed, surveillance is now increasingly fluid, which in turn contributes to the liquefying of everything from national borders to identities. The former were once thought to be imaginary but locatable geographical lines at the edges of national territories but, as we shall see, they are now as much in data processes remote from ‘actual’ borders.5

Equally, identities today are more fluid than fixed, especially in the fast-moving world of social media.6 As I have noted, surveillance works in both space and time to channel the flows and thus to enable social sorting. One major result, elaborated by Bauman, is that power is globalized and harder to pin down, while politics seems to be primarily local and limited.

‘Liquid surveillance’ is less a complete way of specifying surveillance and more an orientation, a way of situating surveillance developments in the fluid and unsettling modernity of today. Surveillance softens especially in the consumer realm, as contrasted with policing and national security surveillance. Old moorings are loosened as bits of personal data extracted for one purpose are more easily deployed for another. Would all men guess when buying flowers or chocolates that eXelate, a data broker, sells this information to others as ‘men in trouble’, presumed to have relationship problems?7 Surveillance spreads in a fashion hitherto unimaginable to non-experts in marketing, thus responding to and reproducing liquidity.

Without a fixed container, but jolted by security demands and tipped by technology companies’ insistent marketing, surveillance spills out all over, just because it is an organizing principle of these activities. Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity frames surveillance in new ways and offers both striking insights into why surveillance develops the way it does and some productive ideas on how its worst effects might be confronted and countered.

Surveillance, once seemingly solid and fixed, now twists and travels at speed, seeping and spreading into many life areas where it once had only marginal sway. Gilles Deleuze coined the phrase ‘society of control’ where surveillance grows less like a tree – relatively rigid, in a vertical plane, like the panopticon – and more like creeping weeds.8 As Haggerty and Ericson observe, following this, the ‘surveillant assemblage’ captures flows of what we might call body data, turning them into highly fluid and mobile ‘data doubles’.9 William Staples also notes that today’s surveillance occurs in cultures ‘characterized by fragmentation and uncertainty as many of the once-taken-for-granted meanings, symbols and institutions of modern life dissolve before our eyes’.10 Thus the bounded, structured and stable liquefies.

The liquidity of today’s surveillance is not limited to the flows of surveillance themselves but also, crucially, to the kinds of social relationships that are possible within a surveillance culture. Shoshana Zuboff points out that the new ‘surveillance capitalism’ of internet companies systematically erodes what was left of mutual and contractual relationships between firms and both their production workers and their consumers. This may be seen at Amazon in Seattle, where the company states that their expected working standards are ‘unreasonably high’ and where employees are urged to send secret messages to bosses, based on their watching others, that prompts sabotaging one’s workmates.11 And in the world of social media, mutual expectations that users might have of each other are often full of uncertainty, shifting and mutable. Such liquidity is not so much caused by new technologies of communication as intensified within new social, economic and technological configurations.

Today’s world is marked by a rampant individualism that debilitates if not destroys certain kinds of sociality. It is enabled and encouraged by online activity, something that can clearly be seen in the comments of young people interviewed by Sherry Turkle for her book Alone Together. As she says, ‘These days, insecure about our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.’12 Similar topics are explored in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, which also mulls the paradox of a culture of connection that has deep relationship troubles. Online performance is a thread running through Turkle’s and Shteyngart’s work, too. The media seem to encourage competition rather than cooperation and, as Bauman notes, seem to do so on marketplace criteria.13 How such social relationships feel the impact of surveillance specifically is explored here.

Contrast all this with a classic model of surveillance, the eighteenth-century ‘panopticon’ prison design of Jeremy Bentham. The circular architecture placed inmates at the periphery, all visible to an ‘inspector’ in a central control tower. However, the inmates could not tell if the inspector, hidden behind Venetian blinds, was actually present. Though uncertainty existed about when the ‘watching’ was actually occurring, inmates and ‘inspector’ were very clear about their mutual relationships. The idea of panoptic surveillance became a key modern means of keeping control, by barring movement among inmates and promoting it among the watchers. But the watchers still had to be present sometimes. Of course, panopticon-style prisons were also expensive and entailed the inspector taking some responsibility for the lives of inmates. In many ways, today’s world is post-panoptical. The inspectors can slip away, escaping to unreachable realms. Whatever mutual engagement might have existed is frayed if not finished. Mobility and nomadism are now prized, unless you are poor or homeless. The smaller, lighter, faster is seen as good – at least in the world of smartphones and tablets.

From panoptic to performative surveillance?

The panopticon is just one model – or better, diagram – of surveillance. The architecture of electronic technologies through which power is asserted in today’s mutable and mobile organizations makes the architecture of walls and windows largely redundant, virtual ‘firewalls’ and ‘windows’ notwithstanding. Of course, the degree of flexibility varies, depending on many factors. Small start-ups are very flexible, but large organizations are often flexible too when it comes to quick market responses.14 And the technological architectures also permit forms of control that display different faces. Not only do they have no obvious connection with imprisonment, they often share the features of flexibility and fun seen in entertainment and consumption. For example, airline check-in can be done, conveniently, using a smartphone, although the passenger name record generated with the initial reservation – also manageable with a smartphone – has to be shared with security agencies in the United States and other countries.

Not only that. Surveillance occurs across life spheres that once were in much more separate silos. Thus discipline – not to mention consumption – and security are actually related, in this view, something that even Michel Foucault failed to recognize. Foucault insisted on their separation at just the moment when their electronic connections were reinforced. Security now uses discipline, for instance, in border control. Security has morphed into a future-oriented enterprise – neatly captured in the novel and film Minority Report (2002) or in the widely watched US TV series Person of Interest – and works through surveillance by attempting to monitor and even to pre-empt what will happen, using digital techniques and statistical reasoning, often referred to today as Big Data.15

Less and less escapes the surveillant eye. As Didier Bigo points out, such security operates by tracking ‘everything that moves, products, information, capital, humanity’.16 So surveillance works at a distance in both space and time, circulating fluidly beyond as well as within nation-states in a globalized realm. Reassurance and rewards accompany those mobile groups for whom such techniques are made to appear ‘natural’ and whose profiles promote them. However, parallel profiling processes and exclusionary measures await the groups unlucky enough to be labelled unworthy or unwelcome.17

However, while discipline and security are still significant, it is also important to consider other aspects of contemporary ‘liquidity’. Social bonds become more brittle and novel forms of individualism come to the fore. While some speak of the ‘me generation’ or ‘celebrity culture’, a term that gets closer to the heart of the matter, as well as offering better links with surveillance, is ‘performance’. It links together the idea that on social media we are all virtuoso performers before a – largely – unseen audience, with the accelerating expectations within any capitalist organization that measuring and tracking worker performance is the overriding priority. After all, the so-called post-Fordist employee assumes that virtuoso performance will be rewarded.18

The idea of surveillance performances animates John McGrath’s work on Loving Big Brother,19 which he prefaces by juxtaposing images of people leaping to their deaths from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the trivial addiction to reality TV in its most famous form – Big Brother. He says that being riveted to the screen reveals how much we desire to watch – we may ‘love Big Brother’ – while at the same time the images of tragedy inform the ways that we encounter our mortality in the deaths of others. Understanding the ways in which watching is already a way of life helps to show why, as McGrath also observes, it is not just terrorism or television that restructures our world, but surveillance itself.

More recently, the concept of ‘monitored performances’20 has been mooted as a productive means of pulling together different threads of surveillance concern, from the performance monitoring of the corporation – ‘this call may be monitored for quality control purposes’ – to the monitored performances of anti-surveillance activists. In between, one might find, for example, the self-surveilling ‘monitored performance’ of the so-called quantified self. This is the use of health-and-fitness devices to collect data to check on our own bodily performances in ways that are, ironically, also monitored extensively by healthcare and insurance agencies. In the following chapter, the theme of performance is prominent, as well as its monitoring, often taken for granted.

Power and politics pull apart

Another aspect of contemporary liquidity is that power and politics are splitting apart. This is a key factor in Bauman’s account of liquid modernity. Power now exists in global and extraterritorial space – think networked national security agencies or global internet companies. But politics, which once linked individual and public interests, remains local, unable to act at the planetary level. Without political control, power becomes a source of great uncertainty, while politics seems irrelevant to many people’s real-life problems and fears.

Surveillance power, as exercised by government departments, police agencies and private corporations, fits this picture. As noted, even national borders, which once had geographical locations – however arbitrary – now appear in airports distant from the ‘edge’ of the territory and, more significantly, in databases that may not even be in the country in question. At Canada’s Pearson Airport in Toronto, for example, a large sign indicates where bag-pulling passengers cross the US border, yet the airport is actually more than 120 kilometres from the land border.

Continuing with this example, the issue of mutable borders is a source of great uncertainty for many. Going through airport security, not knowing exactly whose jurisdiction one is in or where one’s personal details may end up, is an anxious moment, especially for those who may be part of a suspect population. It is also a classic moment for performances. And if one is unfortunate enough to be detained or to discover that your name is on a no-fly list, knowing what to do is notoriously hard. Beyond this, effecting political change that might, for instance, make necessary travel more straightforward is a daunting challenge.

The melting of social forms and the splitting of power and politics are two key features of liquid modernity that have obvious resonance with surveillance, but two further connections are also worth mentioning. One is the mutual relation between new media and fluid relationships. While some blame new media for social fragmentation, Bauman sees things working both ways. He says that, within neoliberal regimes, power must be free to flow, and barriers, fences, borders and checkpoints are a nuisance to be overcome or circumvented. Dense and tight networks of social bonds, especially based in territory, must be cleared away. For him, it is the frailty of those forms that allows these powers to work in the first place.

Many activists see great potential for social solidarity and political organizing in tweets and messaging. Think of the Occupy Movement, or the Arab Spring, in 2010 and 2011, or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. But this is an area to be carefully watched, not least because it is already being surveilled. Social media depend for their existence on monitoring users and selling the data to others. The possibilities for social media resistance are attractive and in some ways fruitful, but they are also limited, due both to the lack of resources for binding relationships in a liquefying world and to the fact that surveillance power within social media is endemic and consequential. The case for hopeful realism is made in the final chapter.

The final connection is that liquid times offer some acute challenges for all who would act ethically, not least in the world of surveillance. Bauman’s recognition of the uncertainties endemic in a liquid modern world shapes the problem as he sees it. And his favoured stance, spurning lifeless rules and regulations, is seen in his stress on the significance of the lived encounter with the other person and the importance of the conversation.21 Realizing our responsibility for the human being before us, as well as for our own humanity, is his starting point.

Components of culture

The emerging surveillance culture arrived with no fanfare. The world of surveillance is often seen – rightly, in many ways – as the domain of powerful organizations dependent on global corporations and utilizing cutting-edge hardware and software. The world of culture, on the other hand, is frequently associated with softer situations, the familiar, sometimes challenging, sometimes comforting, mundane details of daily life. These just evolve over time, often unnoticed, and are then taken for granted. Here, we pull them into view, to defamiliarize the familiar.22 Or, as Dorothy Smith puts it, to ‘see the everyday world as problematic’.23

Much of what might be thought of as surveillance emphasizes its strategies, the large-scale logics of technology and political economy. This all too easily obscures the role of the small-scale tactics of everyday life.24 For instance, some academic discussions of ‘internet users’ have been infected with an abstract, centred, rational view of the self. As Julie Cohen says, they have lost sight of the embodied, social, creative selves who actually encounter, use and experience information.25 Or, as N. Katherine Hayles puts it, information has lost its body.26 This does not demand a return to a simplistic, ‘humanist’ view of the person, but it does mean that more attention should be paid to human action, now more and more mediated through digital technologies. The performance dimension, so important for sensing surveillance culture, has everything to do with embodied experience.

Surveillance culture exhibits forms that are varied and constantly mutating, but they have some common features that I begin to explore here. It is these common features that I refer to in the singular as surveillance culture, which despite the singular-sounding concept is nonetheless multifaceted and complex. As an increasing proportion of social relationships is digitally mediated, subjects are involved not merely as the targets or bearers of surveillance, but as more and more knowledgeable and active participants.

There are two main aspects of this. One has to do with widespread compliance with surveillance. Although attempts to resist surveillance in certain settings are relatively commonplace, in most settings and for most of the time, surveillance has become so pervasive in today’s world that the majority comply without questioning it.27 Much of this is a matter of sheer convenience. Of course, this general collusion with contemporary surveillance is particularly puzzling to those who have lived through the surveillance regimes of authoritarian governments.28 But much compliance may be explained further by reference to three rather commonplace factors – fear, familiarity and fun.29 I comment briefly on these here, but they are also closely related to the themes of chapters 2, 3 and 4, where they are more fully discussed, along with other factors such as trading ‘privacy’ for convenience, or finding more efficient or ingenious ways of using the internet.

On the first, fear has become more marked since 9/11 and it is apparent that the reported desire for surveillance measures relates to the ratcheting up of uncertainty in a media-amplified exploitation of fear.30 All too often, it seems that politicians trade on fear of violence and terrorism to obtain support for the introduction of new security measures, and fear, of course, is a powerful emotion.

By familiarity, I mean that surveillance has become a taken-for-granted aspect of life, from loyalty cards in the supermarket, to ubiquitous cameras in public and private space, and to security routines in airports, sports arenas and many other sites of which many people are less and less aware. I think here of embedded sensors and the so-called data exhaust from our devices. This normalization and domestication of surveillance appears to account in part for the general level of compliance.31

Third, at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from fear, fun also accounts for compliance, above all in the realm of social media and digital devices. While they are integrated into serious life in many self-evident ways, for many users there are many leisure-time and entertainment aspects of the same systems. Anders Albrechtslund suggests that, here, surveillance may be ‘potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful’.32

All three cases, however, are reminders that today it seems entirely natural to many that life is lived online. Edward Snowden, a determined critic of the abuse of power by national security data-gathering, said without irony in 2015: ‘I live on the internet.’ Or, as Daniel Trottier suggests, social media exists as an environment for living, a kind of dwelling.33 This is why the issues raised here are so vital. Everyday life is now enabled by and enmeshed in the digital. While users participated in the technological environments created by driving cars or watching television, there is a sense in which today the technosocial is not only participatory but depends for its character on user contributions. This leads to a further consideration.

The question of why certain populations would comply so readily with surveillance is important and has been widely discussed, but it does not tell the whole surveillance culture story by any means. The second, and larger, issue is why such populations might also participate in, actively engage with and initiate surveillance themselves. Of course, this may not even involve technological assistance. Consider the ‘elf on the shelf’. Though apparently trivial, this cute little doll appears above child level – ‘don’t touch!’ – in many American and Canadian homes before Christmas to assist Santa’s determination of who has been nice or naughty. The doll has no battery, no electronic components, just a warning presence for children: ‘you’re being watched.’ Just a toy, perhaps, but one could be forgiven for seeing it as early preparation for living in a surveillance-suffused world.34 This is a common question of surveillance culture; how far do apparently innocent items intended for play and pleasure double as domestic surveillance?35 Or domesticating surveillance, where what might conventionally be thought of as an unusual activity of deliberate monitoring becomes normal, taken for granted, acceptable? Where habits, as Orwell observed, become instinctive.

Elves notwithstanding, the fact that many tools for doing surveillance are increasingly available is part of the reason for everyday monitoring. But that can hardly be the whole story either. After all, some such tools are adopted and used while others are ignored and neglected. Additionally, the markets are volatile, especially in social media platforms, with some erstwhile leaders such as Facebook losing customers to Instagram – until it bought it – or Snapchat. As in other spheres, social engagement with new technologies cannot somehow be read off technological capacities or availability. These are socio-technical phenomena.

Theorizing surveillance culture

To help grasp the components of surveillance culture, I use the concepts of imaginaries and practices to frame the discussion. Building on Charles Taylor’s analysis of social imaginaries,36 my term, ‘surveillance imaginaries’, has to do with shared understandings about certain aspects of visibility in daily life, and in social relationships, expectations and normative commitments. They provide a capacity to act, to engage in and to legitimate surveillance practices. In turn, surveillance practices help to carry surveillance imaginaries and to contribute to their reproduction. You will recall that the term ‘surveillance culture’ is not for a moment meant to be monolithic. Like any other, surveillance culture is diverse and constantly mutates. In this book, I have in mind primarily the surveillance imaginaries and practices of ordinary users of smartphones and the internet.

Surveillance imaginaries are constructed through everyday involvement with surveillance as well as from news reports and popular media such as film and the internet. They include the growing awareness that modern life is lived ‘under surveillance’, that this affects social relationships in many ways – for instance, ‘will my employer look at my antics on this Facebook page?’ – that the very idea of an expectation of privacy may be moot, and that everything from complacency to confrontation may be appropriate modes of responding to surveillance.

In a world awash with surveillance systems and tools there seems to be evidence that, over time, we build up a mental image of surveillance and how to respond to it. Building on Pierre Bourdieu, authors Michael McCahill and Rachel Finn call this ‘surveillance capital’, which ‘refers to how surveillance subjects utilize the everyday knowledge and cultural know-how that is acquired through first-hand experience…’37 Surveillance capital is closely related to what I call surveillance imaginaries. These latter offer not only a sense of what goes on – the dynamics of surveillance – but also a sense of how to evaluate and engage with it – the duties of surveillance. Such imaginaries, in turn, inform and animate surveillance practices; the two belong together.

Surveillance practices, then, are the things that we engage with, that we do in relation to surveillance. For McCahill and Finn, this includes, prominently, resistance to the power relations expressed by surveillance. I have in mind a range of activities that include but go beyond ‘resistance’. Torin Monahan, among others, speaks of surveillance as a ‘cultural practice’, too, and his view is similar to the one I propose here. For him, this means the inclusion of features such as ‘popular culture, media, art and narrative’ and the attempt ‘to understand people’s engagement with surveillance on their own terms …’38 Each dimension is echoed in this book.

Surveillance practices include responsive activities that relate to being surveilled and also initiatory modes of engagement with surveillance. Examples of the former, responsive practices, include installing some form of encrypted protection from unwanted attention from national security agencies or marketing corporations, or wearing clothing – hats, hoods, masks, some of which are called ‘glamouflage’39 – that limits camera recognition in public places, or eschewing the use of loyalty cards.

Examples of the latter, initiatory practices, on the other hand, include installing a dash-cam to record the activities of other road users while one is driving, using social media to check up on personal details of others, including complete strangers, or indulging in self-surveillance through monitoring heart rates or calculating activity duration and intensity with devices such as Fitbits – often referred to as the ‘quantified self’, discussed later. As noted, these are analytical distinctions, and some kinds of practices may include elements of each.

Exploring today’s surveillance culture through the lenses of imaginaries and practices offers fresh ways of thinking about surveillance in general. It opens up a much more complex cultural landscape than can be captured with the concepts of surveillance state or surveillance society – though it does not supersede them – and simultaneously takes us beyond simple conceptual binaries such as power–participation, in/visibility, privacy–publicness or even the misleading us-and-them of much popular surveillance rhetoric. As noted, for example, for many users of social media, despite popular perceptions to the contrary, privacy is still a highly valued condition, but so also is publicness.40

It is also worth emphasizing that the term ‘surveillance culture’ does not for a moment signify any unified or all-embracing situation. It is merely an umbrella term for many different kinds of phenomena that points to the reality of a whole way of life that relates, positively and negatively, to surveillance. The emphasis on imaginaries and practices already indicates the variety of phenomena that exists in this context. At the same time, one can discern patterns, just as Michel de Certeau shows in The Practice of Everyday Life,41 where the major strategies of consumption are reappropriated in everyday situations. Similarly, I include examples of how strategies of internet corporations are mimicked in the tactics of internet users for their own purposes.

As this is a thread running all through the book, a further comment on the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ is in order. These are significant ways of construing the social world; ones with a long and fascinating history. Yet they are affected by and also affect today’s cultural climate and, of course, they are affected by the new media that help to shape it. Such media permit a kind of publicness well beyond the co-presence of, say, friends arguing politics in a pub. Time and space no longer restrict visibility in ways they once did. Equally, privacy today is less about being ‘let alone’ than about trying to control the flows of information about users of these new media, a situation in which context is crucial. Notions of public and private are contested; vital and ongoing struggles exist especially around internet use. Seeking ‘publicity’, for instance, through social media or craving ‘privacy’ as a ‘right’ appear within the following pages, but a certain ambivalence will also be evident, both in everyday situations and also in the analysis and the politics of surveillance culture.42

Within surveillance culture, people both negotiate surveillance strategies – for instance, often seeing the giving of personal data as a trade-off for personal benefit43 – and also adopt them as their own, modifying them for their circumstances and initiating forms of surveillance on themselves and others.44 Everyday tactics might include getting around assumed limits on the use of some application – the most common has to be falsely claiming to have read the terms of use – to seeing how large-scale surveillance works and appropriating the practice for private use. Facebook users using facial recognition systems for checking on unknown others would be a case in point.

This complicates our understanding of and our responses to surveillance. The crude them-and-us of much popular surveillance opinion does not fit what is actually happening. One is obliged to ask, who’s watching whom? As surveillance itself liquefies, the neat and simple one-way vision of surveillance becomes less relevant and even misleading.

Surveillance imaginaries

The surveillance imaginary, then, is my shorthand for how various features of what has been called the surveillance society influence how people picture themselves in their social arrangements and relationships, such that in ordinary everyday life they include and even embrace surveillance in their vision of how societies are ordered and their roles within that. The scripts – or ‘treatments’ to be improvised, if we think of screen rather than stage – for the dramas to which I have referred are provided by surveillance imaginaries. Again, this analysis resonates with performance.

On a larger canvas, Charles Taylor speaks of the modern social imaginary as a kind of vision of moral order, how people imagine society. It reveals facets of shared lives and also tells something about how people should live together and what is worth striving for. A social imaginary is not a theory; it is how in everyday life we imagine our social world. It is widely shared and is ‘a common understanding which makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’.45 In an information era, one might add, it is also compressed, fragmentary and flowing.

Interestingly, an earlier and widespread social change in modern social imaginaries, suggests Taylor, was in the shift from hierarchies of personal links towards an impersonal, egalitarian order where ‘direct access’ is commonplace.46 Modern individualism, for example, produced new forms of belonging, from what both Taylor and Craig Calhoun call ‘relational’ to ‘categorical’ identities.47 More and more, people locate themselves socially in relation to impersonal entities. This connects with the idea of ‘categorical suspicion’ and ‘categorical seduction’ that refer, respectively, to policing and intelligence surveillance practices, on the one hand, and to commercial and marketing surveillance, on the other.48

Surveillance imaginaries include the following sorts of assumptions: to organize or oversee anything, data are needed, and using data is more efficient than previous methods or at worst a necessary evil. There are technical systems that will facilitate this, and indeed, that will do the job best. Security is a key driver and justification of extra surveillance. In the realm of communication – above all in social media – it is believed that such surveillance is far less significant than that involving state agencies.

Other shared assumptions that comprise imaginaries may include ideas about trading ‘privacy’ for benefits – ‘I don’t mind exchanging a little liberty for the convenience of a fast-track airport pass’ – or that if one has ‘nothing to hide there is nothing to fear’. Engagement with media, as producers-cum-consumers, is articulated with imaginaries. These are what Torin Monahan calls ‘local practices with global significance’.49 Media such as film and TV shows offer fresh understandings of social life, as Raymond Williams would have noted, as does understanding the varied meanings of surveillance in international contexts.

One way of thinking about surveillance imaginaries is to consider the ways that camera surveillance has become a familiar part of the urban landscape, and thus of everyday life. Public cameras are an inescapable part of our vision of the city and many are aware of the kind of view – grainy footage – they offer. So much so that Jonathan Finn suggests that, in Western cultures especially, people now ‘see surveillantly’.50 In this, he updates Susan Sontag’s claim that ‘In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.’51

Although others had experienced such things before, such surveillant seeing was viscerally visible to me at a protest march in 2010. Those attending the demonstration against the closure of prison farms in my own city, Kingston, knew to bring their phones to monitor police behaviour, just as the police used hand-held or body-worn cameras to record crowd behaviours.52 In some situations, such as among the Palestinian population in Israel, bystanders are encouraged by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem to shoot back, using video, so that evidence of police and military activities may be shared with others who are not present.53 These examples ‘highlight ways in which surveillance exists as an aesthetic concept, a rhetorical tool, and as a form of participation in social life’. Thus Finn concludes that ‘surveillance is no longer the purview of police, the state and corporations’ but that ‘it is a constitutive element of life…’ which ‘requires a self-reflexive look at our own willingness and desire to watch, record and display our lives and the lives of others’ – which is just what this book aspires to do.

It is also important, beyond our own engagement or participation in camera surveillance, to note the role of television – along with novels, films and music, of course – in providing components of a surveillance imaginary. For instance, the popular American television series Person of Interest54 features a central character, Mr Finch, who has developed what is simply called The Machine, for the US government to sort information culled from public and private sources in order to predict future terrorist actions.

The Machine sorts events involving potential violence into important, that is, terrorist, and unimportant, interpersonal. Mr Finch has created a back door to The Machine, which provides him with a daily social security number of someone who is involved in an ‘unimportant’ crime. Viewers from the beginning of each episode do not know whether or not the person of interest is a potential victim or perpetrator of the possible crime. Mr Finch utilizes the data provided by The Machine to attempt to prevent ‘unimportant’ crimes. This show examines the moral dimensions of both surveillance and social sorting. Mr Finch admits, ‘I’m a sucker for surveillance.’

Surveillance practices

Surveillance practices make up a growing repertoire of daily activities in the twenty-first century. Some, such as adjusting privacy settings, are obvious; others, such as donning a Fitbit or adjusting your online profile, may not strike one as primarily surveillant. This assumes that everyone is a creative actor, constantly drawing upon and reproducing cultural knowledge55 – in this case, knowledge of surveillance. We all live in what Pierre Bourdieu calls a habitus,56 which is how we do things, often unthinkingly, every day.

There is a logic to such activities, even if the ‘actors’ cannot necessarily articulate it, but this logic – from shielding a password at the cash machine to checking a Facebook friend’s party-going – lasts over time and reappears routinely as it is repeated. And it goes beyond what each person does deliberately and with focused thinking. All sorts of unplanned events occur daily on micro-levels of human interaction below the surface of conscious awareness or intention.

Technological systems – from tax forms and ID cards to public street cameras or cellphones – are themselves integral to everyday practices and are important components of modern myth and ritual. In this context, then, surveillance systems become inserted in everyday activities as one more thing to negotiate and are given meaning as people tap into their symbolic reservoirs, which, as Torin Monahan observes, can include narrative, media and art, among other things.57 In this view, surveillance is embedded within, achieved by and generates many social practices depending on the context.

Surveillance appears more and more as an everyday activity as well as something orchestrated by organizations. As Michel de Certeau insists, so-called mass culture must be rethought in ways that take account of how ordinary people appropriate its various aspects and make them their own. Sometimes this still chimes with social and political expectations, but at other times people may be ploughing their own furrow, or altering an item to better suit their own purposes. When this occurs, the supposed shaping power of mass culture may not be quite so predictable: ‘If it is true that the grid of discipline is becoming everywhere clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also “minuscule” and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only to evade them…’58 How this applies to surveillance practices can be fruitfully explored in many contexts.

John Gilliom, for instance, draws our attention to the ways that ordinary people respond to what academics call surveillance.59 His classic study of women on welfare shows how, in the face of the strategic, calculating and technical power of the casework software used by social workers, known as Cris-e, there are multiple and ingenious ways of responding. The women about whom he wrote never thought of themselves as engaging in resistance to surveillance so much as simply being in an ongoing struggle with powers that seemed set to stop them caring for their children as they saw fit. They had their own agendas and chose their moment to subvert, dissemble, or even to cooperate with the functionaries associated with the system – social workers – to make sense of their own lives and to attempt to live beyond the reach of power while not actually removing themselves from or revolting against it.

This echoes de Certeau’s insistence that it is mistaken to assume that users, consumers or whatever are passive and willingly guided by established rules. Everyday practices should be explored to discover how people actually operate, how they go on, faced by the strategies of power. Such cultural practices add up to something significant because, although there may be, among other things, dominating systems of surveillance, those subject to them are unlikely to be submissively docile.60

In the world of social media, however, new practices become evident. They first become habitual, then instinctive. Mark Andrejevic, for instance, talks of ‘Lateral surveillance, or peer-to-peer monitoring, understood as the use of surveillance tools by individuals, rather than by agents of institutions public or private, to keep track of one another…’ He says it ‘covers (but is not limited to) three main categories: romantic interests, family, and friends or acquaintances’. Thus the world of everyday is suffused with surveillance practices in the ‘everyday spaces of our homes and offices, from law enforcement and espionage to dating, parenting, and social life. In an era in which everyone is to be considered potentially suspect, we are invited to become spies – for our own good.’61

Interestingly, Daniel Trottier takes this further, uncovering the ‘mutual augmentation’ of surveillance on Facebook, where different users learn surveillance practices from others.62 The users in question are individual users, institutions (such as universities, where Facebook began), marketers and police. Trottier’s research indicates that their own visibility on the site is a primary motivation to watch others on the site. As all parties engage in surveillance, so their ethical concerns about covert scrutiny are dampened. The techniques of one group may be appropriated by others in a constant upward spiral. Equally, the surveillance strategies of Facebook itself are enhanced by Facebook’s attempts to understand what users do to find out about each other. As users become more and more aware of how Facebook keeps track of them, so they discover ways of keeping track of others.63

At the end of the day, though, does this mean that surveillance itself must be understood differently? Such everyday monitoring cannot merely be thought of in minatory, menacing ways, as if Big Brother were still looming behind it. When the roles, the imaginaries and practices of everyday users are taken into account, surveillance appears in more complex forms. While some surveillance is intrusive, undemocratic, disempowering, other forms seem participatory, playful, possibly empowering. Discerning which is which is a critical exercise.

Anders Albrechtslund suggests that social media offer fresh perspectives on surveillance. Characteristic of online social networking is the sharing, exploring and mutually checking-out of various activities, preferences, beliefs. He concludes that such surveillance practices cannot be adequately described within the framework of a hierarchical understanding of surveillance. Rather, online social networking seems to introduce a participatory approach to surveillance, which can empower – and not necessarily violate – the user.64

Surveillance culture takes shape

Surveillance is not static. The world of surveillance is constantly shifting, mutating, expanding, but not, at present at least, contracting. It is imperative that efforts to understand and respond to surveillance try to keep pace, not with every single new gadget or system, but with the key features of current developments. And it goes without saying that some new devices and assemblages do yield important clues about those ‘key features’. One can trace the development of various dimensions of surveillance cultures through the twentieth century in particular, but now many societies seem to be on the cusp of further significant change.

Here, I am suggesting that surveillance should now be thought of, not only as relating to economic, technological, social or political realities, but as a highly significant cultural formation in the making. There is a growing awareness that watching and being watched are part of a whole way of life. Many in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century would have responded to the idea of surveillance societies, indicating how experiences of monitoring and tracking had strayed beyond state surveillance. All along, however, there was a growing tilt towards everyday life through information infrastructures and an increasing dependence on the digital in mundane relationships, all of which feeds into today’s emerging surveillance culture.

Shifts may also be discerned from localized and enclosed surveillance to mobile and liquid surveillance, as embeddedness and ubiquity increase. State administration and security concerns have not disappeared. They are still very present as surveillance generators. But now surveillance – not only as done by vast agencies such as the NSA – penetrates the capillary levels of life. The move is beyond mainframes and personal computing, where computing machinery is embedded, more or less invisibly, in the environments of everyday life. This has given rise to phenomena variously referred to as ‘ubiquitous computing’ or the ‘internet of things’. Paradoxically, these render the means of everyday visibility less visible. Cities are now being built or restructured as ‘smart cities’ – as seen in the futuristic city of Songdo in South Korea65 – or in many plans for urban renewal.

Personal data are sought by multifarious entities, some having no direct relation to formal government, such that surveillance now affects everyday life in routine and profound ways. What began as database marketing in the 1980s and 1990s drew attention to the non-government use of personal data, although the trend really began with the spread of credit cards in the 1970s.66

As awareness grows of everyday surveillance, so it becomes more prominent in the picturing of daily life, in mundane surveillance imaginaries. And as different populations interact with it, complying, negotiating, resisting and even initiating surveillance practices, so the imaginaries are mobilized in action. Dealing with public space cameras has been one growing dimension of this, but securitization, especially of travel, has also prompted new practices. The rapid rise of social media is yet another – highly consequential – example of the same.

Let me stress once again that the culture of surveillance is not monolithic. Great diversity is evident across different populations and, as mentioned earlier, the very notion of surveillance culture is marked by fluidity rather than fixity. As we shall see, there are patterns that repeat across different cities and countries, but their prior experiences also contribute to the varieties of surveillance experience that are exhibited. Most of the research on which this book depends is from the English-speaking world and is primarily from North America and Europe. I tried to hear the voices of Asia, Latin America and Africa and also had readers from those parts of the world check my work. But this cannot possibly do justice to the variations available internationally, let alone in terms of class, gender and race.67

While much research now focuses on surveillance issues, few international comparisons exist, especially ones that are updated. An interesting snapshot of some dimensions of surveillance culture is seen in an international quantitative and qualitative study conducted in 2006, that showed a number of important variations around the world.68 But while it could take account of changing views following 9/11, the attacks on New York and Washington, it is highly likely that these will have altered again after the disclosures of documents from the NSA by Edward Snowden in 2013. Nonetheless, it is worth noting some important variations from the study, if only to draw attention to their existence.

Globally, the majority of respondents worried about providing personal information online (Japan 82%, Brazil 70%, Spain 62%, US 60%, China 54%, Canada 66%). The majority of respondents did not believe that they had much say in what happened to their personal information (only 30% of Canadians, Americans, Spaniards and Hungarians believed they had complete or a lot of say; Chinese, Japanese and French felt they had the most say, at 67%, 62% and 61%, compared with Mexicans 40% and Brazilians 34%).

Those in Canada, US, France and Spain claimed to be more knowledgeable of the internet and other personal location technologies, whereas those in Mexico and Brazil claimed to be the least knowledgeable about these. Only a minority of people trusted that the government or private companies would do an appropriate job of protecting their personal information; in most countries, people trusted corporations more than government. However, Canadians and Americans were the most protective of their personal information.

People were ambivalent about businesses creating profiles of their customers and their membership in rewards-type customer profiling programmes. It seems that either people do not know or do not care. In a given population, the largest group (41%) assumed that government and business would protect their data and, while they might resist some activities as intrusive or unnecessary, in general they would comply. The next-largest group (33%) did not trust government or business with their data but they felt relatively powerless and fearful because they did not know what would happen to their online data. The third group (26%) did not trust government or businesses with their data either, but this was because they knew more about how they are used. They felt they lacked control over their data but would take steps to avoid surveillance.

Not only are surveillance cultures very varied and constantly mutating, they are also full of tension and ambiguity. While Bentham may have seen his panopticon prison as the midwife that would birth a modern utopia, Foucault queried this by noting that ‘visibility is a trap’. Is this a dystopian way of interpreting the world? Such ambiguity provides for a creative tension in grappling with contemporary surveillance. What will the new cultures of surveillance mean for such ambiguities?

Surveillance culture certainly does not mean that new modes of monitoring and tracing will produce an orderly and efficient, let alone a just, society. As Walter Benjamin noted, ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’,69 and the same kind of Janus-faced developments are found in all kinds of surveillance. Even surveillance systems set up supposedly to mitigate the worst effects of poverty may end up simply causing more pain and problems among those they are intended to help, such as women on welfare. Good and evil are evident within all cultures, including the cultures of surveillance.

What do we know about so-called surveillance cultures? The mere fact that, for example, users of the internet and of social media divulge much information about themselves to corporations as they purchase online or present themselves through social media tells us nothing about how or why this occurs. It does seem that users generally say they want to have a sense of control over their information, but they often also choose the path of least resistance when making choices about managing their profiles. Young adult users are often more careful managing their reputations than older ones. However, many do not know what information about them is available to others, or do not mind information being connected with their names but will show concern about how it might be used, or may like aspects of customized marketing but dislike the online data collection and monitoring.

Conclusion

Alongside the more familiar state and societal surveillance, a surveillance culture is quietly appearing in which it is hard if not impossible not to participate. It is a fluid form of surveillance, constantly melting, morphing and merging, in ways that reflect the liquidity of data flows that characterizes what happens both in security intelligence agencies like the NSA and internet companies such as Amazon. But to focus on the cultural, our perspective must pull round from the panoptic to the performative, and to the roles people play across the spectrum from supporting to subverting surveillance.

To grasp all this means delving more deeply into the culture of surveillance in all its variety and variation. The succeeding chapters put more flesh on the bones of the components of surveillance culture. And we explore many surveillance imaginaries and practices that become visible – and are also about visibility – that appear as surveillance culture takes its distinctive shapes.

Notes