Pick up any book on surveillance and most make reference to Big Brother or an Orwellian future. George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, has informed and infused a popular sense of what surveillance entails for over half a century. ‘There was’, writes Orwell, ‘no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.’ Thus, he went on, the inhabitants of Oceania lived their daily lives ‘from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized’.1 It is those ‘habits that become instinct’ that speak of surveillance culture where, in the case of Oceania, the citizens’ vision of the world was dominated by the screen warning that ‘Big Brother is watching you’ and their everyday practices mirrored that menacing reality.
But this book proposes that to understand surveillance culture, Nineteen Eighty-Four must be put on one side. Not that Orwell had nothing to say – far from it; his work is still deeply relevant, depicting some features distressingly familiar to many who lived through the twentieth century’s dictatorships, warning against a subtle slide into state control within supposed liberal democracies and urging readers to seek a world of decency, tolerance and humanity. Rather, my message is that Big Brother is the wrong metaphor for surveillance today. To persist with the language of a totalitarian tyrant who threatens his victims with ravenous rats and kicking jackboots simply deflects attention from what is actually going on in the world of surveillance. Some surveillance situations are indeed sinister and sadistic and are rightly deplored as such. But most people’s experience of surveillance today is not like that, which is why going beyond Big Brother is necessary now more than ever.
In the early 1990s, in my book The Electronic Eye, I observed that for all that may be learned from Orwell, he could not have guessed at the role that new, computer technologies on the one hand, and consumerism on the other, would play in creating surveillance as it was evolving in the late twentieth century. But I have since been obliged to recognize that surveillance has moved on again. What is experienced in the twenty-first century now depends deeply on the participation of those being surveilled. Indeed, as I suggest in this book’s subtitle, not only being watched but watching itself has become a way of life. Orwell’s characters lived in gnawingly fearful uncertainty about when and why they were watched. Today’s surveillance is made possible by our own clicks on websites, our texting messages and exchanging photos. Ordinary people contribute to surveillance as never before. User-generated content engenders the data by which daily doings are monitored. This is how surveillance culture takes shape.
By the culture of surveillance2 I refer to the sorts of things that an anthropologist might study – customs, habits and ways of looking at and interpreting the world. The focus is on surveillance in everyday life rather than, primarily, in the octopus tentacles of global intelligence and policing networks or the subtle and seductive sirens of corporate marketing. Understood here, the culture of surveillance is about how surveillance is imagined and experienced, and about how mundane activities of walking down a street, driving a car, checking for messages, buying in stores or listening to music are affected by and affect surveillance. And about how surveillance is also initiated and engaged by those who have become familiar with and even inured to surveillance.
So this book is not primarily about the culture of surveillance thought of in a literary or artistic sense. It spends little time exploring surveillance worlds that spring from creative imagination – in films, songs, novels, TV series or art. But it does pay attention to these insofar as they illuminate the more ‘anthropological’ worlds of surveillance in everyday life. Works of popular culture retain a vital importance. Many of them are wonderfully wise and offer penetrating perceptions of surveillance culture. Moreover, much has been written about the intriguing insights available in such literary, musical, video and artistic productions, that also help to throw light on culture in the ‘way of life’ sense.3 That said, having noted that one has to go beyond Orwell to grasp the realities of surveillance today, I feel obliged to suggest some sites where the ‘beyond’ lies. They are scattered through this book but, for me, one in particular stands out.
The world of today’s surveillance has everything to do with California’s famous Silicon Valley, the incubator par excellence of the digital world that has so rapidly become familiar to so much of the world’s population. It comes as little surprise, then, that one of the most telling inheritors of Orwell’s mantle set his scene in Silicon Valley. In the title of a 2013 novel, The Circle is not only the name of the high-tech corporation where the protagonist, Mae, goes to work. It is also a metaphor for the way that all of life is increasingly subsumed into a digital world, encircled by cyberspace. Mae is ranked by her ‘zings’ at the keyboard and wears her ‘TruYou’ ID and ‘SeeChange’ camera at all times as she integrates herself into life at the hip and happy environment of glass-walled transparency. Despite momentary doubts, she rises rapidly to become an icon and a celebrity at the centre of The Circle’s influence. She went fully transparent.
Dave Eggers, inspired author of The Circle, deliberately references Orwell through devices such as updated slogans. The latter’s Freedom is Slavery gives way to Sharing is Caring in this soft surveillance world of consumer comforts and casual workwear. And as Peter Marks drily remarks, The Circle is a child of Big Data rather than Big Brother.4 This is the point. Today’s cultures of surveillance, those crucial ways of seeing and being in the digital milieu, are inseparable from the so-called data exhaust pouring from millions of machines every moment of every day and the greedy global effort to create value from them. What people perceive, by and large, is the amazing power of the internet to keep them connected, amused, entertained, supplied, updated, reassured and informed. As they engage with the online world, however, they not only improvise responses to the subtle ways that they are watched but also use those surveillance technologies for their own ends. Thus are new surveillance cultures born.
In short, then, this book brings together two different kinds of issues concerning surveillance in the twenty-first century. On the one hand is the truism that surveillance is an everyday fact of life that we not only encounter from outside, as it were, but also in which we engage, from within, in many contexts. It is sometimes welcomed as a means to greater security or convenience, sometimes queried or resisted as being inappropriate or excessive, and sometimes engaged as an enjoyable or reassuring possibility offered by systems or devices – there is a potential to observe or monitor others and ourselves as never before. Things like social media surveillance often seem like a soft set of activities, seemingly inconsequential, but as I shall insist, they actually contribute to social-cultural transformation. Watching has become a way of life.
On the other hand, the kinds of data now circulating in greater volume, velocity and variety – to use the words often applied to Big Data – than ever are of tremendous interest to a growing range of actors, not just government departments, security agencies and police, but also internet companies, healthcare providers, traffic engineers, city planners and many more. The data are very valuable, both financially, as commodities to be exploited and traded in billion dollar markets and related contexts, and also as the means of governing or even controlling others. Watching as a way of life is inextricably bound up with these other realities, which means that our theme is far from marginal or minimal in relation to the major ethical and political challenges of our times.
There is thus a tension between the digital lives of people routinely and innocently immersed in social media, game-like – or ‘gamified’ – online contexts and self-tracking, and those whose opportunities, life-chances and choices are affected, sometimes negatively, by how others collect, store, classify and analyse those data. One group of commentators points out that surveillance is clearly enjoyable, empowering and playful for some, and that this should be appreciated for the meaningful cultural phenomenon that it is. Others observe that those very activities may play into the hands of much more threatening forces and that therefore the focus of surveillance studies should be on the dehumanizing and freedom-denying aspects of today’s monitoring and tracking.
The characteristics of surveillance as a way of life are in many respects different from earlier surveillance cultures, for instance those in close-knit and geographically localized communities. Common features of today’s surveillance include the data being easily quantified, highly traceable, likely to have an economic – monetized – dimension, and to be garnered at a distance – they are deterritorialized. They are less ‘solid’, more ‘liquid’, but still share patterns of connection and activity. And they are marked by deep ambivalence. Online consumers, for example, believe that they are free to choose what they buy, despite the ever more palpable fact of consumer surveillance. Yet they often try to present themselves in a highly favourable light that plays into the social surveillance in which they also engage.
I stress that the imaginaries and practices of surveillance culture today should be taken very seriously, and argue, simultaneously, that they cannot but be directly linked with our understanding of the kinds of surveillance carried out by internet companies, national security agencies and others. The same data often flow not only between us and other users but also between the public and private sectors. The same methods are used to make sense of and act on those data. And those participating in social media surveillance learn from the strategies of large organizations and vice versa. Also, becoming familiar with objects and technologies in one domain may normalize those in the other. Different cultural contexts help shape how people interpret their experiences of surveillance.5
Watching others, surveillantly, is an ancient practice. Throughout most of human history, surveillance has been a minority activity, something done by specific persons or organizations. Today, much surveillance is still a specialized activity, carried out by police and intelligence agencies and, of course, by corporations. But it is also something that is done domestically, in everyday life. Parents use surveillance devices to check children, friends observe others on social media, and it is increasingly common to use gadgets to monitor ourselves for health and fitness. The same kinds of watching occur, now using different tools, that offer the novel characteristics mentioned above. Thus watching becomes a way of life.
‘Surveillance’ is a tricky word. Its French origin in the word surveiller – literally, to ‘watch over’ – is clear enough. The problem is, what might a tight definition include and exclude? In what follows, surveillance means the operations and experiences of gathering and analysing personal data for influence, entitlement and management. As Gary Marx says, sagely, ‘Surveillance technology is not simply applied; it is also experienced by subjects, agents and audiences who define, judge and have feelings about being watched or a watcher.’6
My definition still begs further questions, such as what counts as ‘personal data’? These will be considered later. For now, note the breadth of coverage. Surveillance may be done, for example, by corporations that exert influence by looking at your social media profile to decide how to persuade you to buy their product, by government departments that judge your entitlement by looking at your bank records to determine if you qualify for social assistance, or agencies such as police making management decisions about the best route for a parade. But it may also be carried out by people in everyday life, on others, in checking profiles of interest or on ourselves, otherwise known as self-tracking.
Today’s emerging ‘surveillance culture’ is unprecedented. A key feature is that people actively participate in and attempt to regulate their own surveillance and the surveillance of others. There is growing evidence of patterns of perspectives, outlooks or mentalités on surveillance, along with some closely related modes of initiating, negotiating or resisting surveillance. Who has not heard the popular mantras, trotted out by politicians and people in everyday life, ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’? Or, ‘we need surveillance to keep us safe and secure’. Common enough, but controversial, as we shall see.
Surveillance culture has appeared as people engage more and more with the means of monitoring. Many check on others’ lives using social media, for instance. At the same time, the ‘others’ make this possible by allowing themselves to be exposed to public view in texts and tweets, posts and pics. Some people also engage with surveillance when they worry about how much others, especially large, opaque organizations such as airlines or security agencies, know about them.
Lest the impression is given that the appearance of surveillance culture is somehow random, unanticipated or unavoidable, however, this book also stresses that the commercially available systems are designed to permit and enable such cultural developments to occur. The more you search on social media for the same kinds of people, checking them for similar interests and lifestyles, the more the companies can customize their advertising and personalize their profiles. This does not make those users into mere dupes of the system, of course. Some may use the systems in ways not intended by designers, ways that may even be more humane, just or democratic.7 But the point is that significant aspects of surveillance culture reflect possibilities that are built into the commercial platforms.
People may respond in a variety of ways to emerging surveillance culture. For instance, they may take steps to block the surveillance of some, to limit who may view their lives. But many just get on with those lives, even if they know about some aspects of surveillance. In other words, like it or not, everyone has more of a stake in surveillance than when it was thought of as the ‘surveillance state’ or even the ‘surveillance society’. Those words describe how surveillance is done to individuals and groups. The surveillance culture goes beyond these. While acknowledging what goes on in organizational surveillance, it turns the spotlight on all our very varied roles in relation to surveillance.
Thus surveillance culture is characterized by user-generated surveillance. Riffing on Web 2.0’s notion of user-generated content, we can observe that the same technological capacities – or ‘affordances’ as they are called, technically – allow users to contribute content and, at the same time, to generate forms of surveillance. On one hand, user involvement with devices and platforms such as smartphones and Twitter creates data used in organizational surveillance. And on the other, users themselves act surveillantly as they check up on, follow and score others with ‘likes’, ‘recommendations’ and other evaluative criteria. As they do so, they not only interact with their online connections, but also with the subtle ways in which the platforms are created to foster particular kinds of interchange.
So this book is also a kind of real-life map of today’s surveillance world – though like Google’s StreetView it does not cover everything! – focusing particularly on those who are willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged with it in ordinary everyday life, producing user-generated surveillance. For instance, it considers what emotions are aroused by surveillance and devotes one chapter to an appraisal of Dave Eggers’ The Circle.8 This is one way of getting the feel for surveillance culture today, just as listening to The Police singing ‘Every breath you take’ or watching Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s movie The Lives of Others or an episode of the TV series Black Mirror might.
A recent and ongoing example shows how surveillance culture relates to some pressing issues concerning surveillance in general. The kind of ‘suspicionless surveillance’ carried out by intelligence agencies such as the American National Security Agency (NSA), to which disillusioned subcontractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosure of documents in 2013 drew attention, cannot be understood simply in terms of older – though still relevantly current – concepts such as ‘surveillance state’ or ‘surveillance society’.9 They are inadequate, not incorrect.
They now have to be supplemented with a concept that focuses more on the active roles played by surveillance subjects, not least because those roles make a difference both to our own lives and to the surveillance outcomes. Attending to what occurs within various aspects of surveillance culture helps to explain why the responses to Snowden – and to surveillance in general – have been so diverse. Some express outrage and mobilize politically. Some are grateful that governments are doing something about crime and terrorism. Others are just getting on with their lives as consumers, content with the convenience, unconcerned. But as we shall see, a critical issue is how far any consumers and citizens examine their own roles within the mushrooming surveillance systems of today.
The culture of surveillance was becoming visible from the turn of the twenty-first century, especially after the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001 and the advent of social media. Military, state and corporate collusion in organizational surveillance was evident in responses to 9/11. But soon after, the explosion of social media helped to create surveillance culture as a shadow of what might be termed managerial or entrepreneurial surveillance in which growing efforts were made to extract value from personal data. And surveillance culture became even clearer after Edward Snowden copied and released incriminating documents from the NSA in 2013. Historians may discern the first signs of surveillance culture in the later twentieth century, but now they are present on a broad scale and their contours are becoming clear.
What else is meant by surveillance culture? Raymond Williams defined culture as a ‘whole way of life’.10 This book investigates the notion that surveillance is becoming part of a whole way of life. Hence my use of the word ‘culture’. Surveillance is no longer merely something external that impinges on ‘our lives’. It is also something that everyday citizens comply with – willingly and wittingly or not – negotiate, resist, engage with and, in novel ways, even initiate and desire. From being an institutional aspect of modernity or a technologically enhanced mode of social discipline or control, surveillance is now internalized in new ways. It informs everyday reflections on how things are, and the repertoire of everyday practices.
But the idea of surveillance culture as a way of life could sound as if everyone is involved or implicated in the same way. As we shall see, nothing could be further from the truth. Surveillance culture is multifaceted, complicated, fluid and rather unpredictable. Williams’s notion of culture took such complexity into account by suggesting that while there are dominant elements of any discernible culture – thus warranting the description of ‘culture’ – other elements may be identified as well. He spoke of ‘residual’ ones that represent older, fading aspects of culture, but which still play a cultural role. And of newer, ‘emergent’ ones, that might also be a part of dominant culture, but could also be oppositional or at least alternative to it.11
The surveillance culture discussed here accents the everyday dimensions of dominant political-economic surveillance systems. Interestingly, the document disclosures of Edward Snowden may be seen as residual and emergent at the same time. Residual in that he blew the whistle as a loyal and patriotic government worker, but emergent in that he initiated a new way of drawing attention to surveillance overreach – cooperating with journalists rather than simply exposing the facts on his own, to ensure maximum publicity. He certainly brings some important debates into the foreground – questions of digital rights in relation to both corporations and government departments and agencies, and of who has responsibility for flows of data across borders, flows that have clear consequences for life-chances and freedoms.12 But also, crucially, his intervention shows clearly that the data in question were primarily generated by ordinary users, us, using the internet, phones and other everyday devices.
The Snowden disclosures also served – even if only briefly – to revitalize controversies over the role of online political activity that had surfaced widely from 2011 after the so-called Arab Spring, contested democratic movements in several Middle Eastern and North African countries,13 and that were to flower again between September and December 2014 with the Umbrella Movement that protested Chinese limits on democracy in Hong Kong.14 To what extent were the new media the means of fomenting popular and radical change and to what extent were they the tools of repression and the denial of democratic aspirations? This may also be read as a larger question for the whole book. If surveillance is constantly extended and intensified by digital means, how far can the same kinds of technology be used to limit, redirect or refashion surveillance for different ends?
Surveillance culture is best seen in relation to the astonishing growth of what may fairly be called ‘digital modernity’, from the twentieth but especially in the twenty-first century. By ‘modernity’ is meant the social, political, economic and cultural arrangements that have become globally dominant in the past 250 years or so. Western forms of modernity include industrial capitalism and liberal democracy. The media of communication are always vital to cultural developments and in many ways the television culture of the twentieth century made way for the internet culture – especially surveillance – in the twenty-first.15 Exploring the origins, carriers and consequences of surveillance culture is a way of contextualizing more effectively the ‘post-Snowden’ world.
But ‘digital modernity’ does not exist on its own. It is wrapped up with another significant cultural shift, which plays down ‘discipline’16 or ‘control’ and foregrounds ‘performance’.17 This was not caused by the digital. It relates more to shifting identity sources from the world of work, producing, to the world of consuming. With weakening ties to obedience, law and obligation, a strong cultural current today supports liberty and desires and leans towards their satisfaction. The new imperative is to perform. It is individualistic and, among other things, fosters a fear of inadequacy. Accumulate those Facebook likes! Find out how many followers you have! Performance orientation is precarious, fragmented and in real-time – a situation exploited, as we shall see, by both government and corporation.18 Expectations morph rapidly; lead times shrink. Relationships are fleeting. Under such circumstances, the very idea of regulating surveillance, for instance, is queried.
The presence of surveillance culture raises fresh questions for everyday involvement with digital media, questions with ethical and political aspects that, I shall argue, point to possibilities and challenges for ‘digital citizenship’. Both surveillance and citizenship are now mediated by the digital and by the penchant for performance. What is the setting for this?
Surveillance culture is a product of contemporary late modern conditions or, simply, of ‘digital modernity’. From the later twentieth century especially, corporate and state modes of surveillance, mediated by increasingly fast and powerful new technologies, tilted towards everyday life. The expansion of information infrastructures and our increasing dependence on the digital in mundane relationships facilitated this. All cultural shifts relate in significant ways to social, economic and political conditions. So today’s surveillance culture forms through organizational dependence, political-economic power, security linkages and social media engagement. All these depend on the assumption that you are online or that you have a phone in your pocket or purse.
First, contrast surveillance culture with previous terms in common currency. The ‘surveillance state’ worked well in the postwar ‘Orwellian’ period and of course can still capture significant aspects of surveillance today, such as the activities of intelligence agencies. But even there, the ‘surveillance state’ is heavily dependent on commercial entities – internet and telephone companies – to provide the desired data.19 While such data have been used, via warrants, by police and security agencies for decades, the mass scale on which this now happens alters the dynamic.
Not only the mass scale, either. The enthusiasm for Big Data ‘solutions’, for instance, is strongly correlated with the widespread and rapidly expanding volume of data from computers, phones, cameras, drones and sensors of all kinds, both fixed and mobile, and of course social media. Data are harvested constantly from devices and systems that are always on and stored for already existing surveillance needs or until some purpose is found for them. This mode of data gathering and analysis raises many questions for conventional understandings of surveillance and privacy.
Today, no one is unaffected by the very post-Orwellian collusion of governmental and corporate forces. As well, many of those data are themselves generated in the first place by the everyday online activities of millions of ordinary citizens. And this means that users collude as never before in their own surveillance by sharing – whether willingly or wittingly, or not – their personal information in the online public domain. ‘Surveillance culture’ helps to situate this collusion, this sharing. If this is ‘state surveillance’, it has a deeply different character from that which in popular terms is ‘Orwellian’.
If the ‘surveillance state’ is an inadequate concept, what about ‘surveillance society’? Well, while this notion helps to indicate the broader context within which the unsettling discoveries about the ‘mass surveillance’ engaged in by the NSA and its ‘Five Eyes’20 partners occur, it also falls short of explaining today’s situation. ‘Surveillance society’ was originally used to indicate ways in which surveillance was spilling over the rims of its previous containers – government departments, policing agencies, workplaces – to affect many aspects of daily life. But the emphasis was still on how surveillance was carried out in ways that increasingly touched the routines of social life, from outside, as it were.21 ‘Surveillance society’ was often used in ways that paid scant attention to citizens’, consumers’, travellers’ or employees’ experience of and engagement with surveillance.
From the later twentieth century onwards, surveillance became a central organizing feature of societies that had developed information infrastructures. The only way to manage the increasing complexity was to develop new categories to sort through differences.22 Who is creditworthy?23 Everyone is rated and placed in some calculated category. Who should be on a no-fly list? There are criteria for deciding which groups are more likely than others. Organizations of all kinds sort data about people into groups, so that the persons themselves can be treated differently, depending on the group.
By the early twenty-first century, evidence was emerging of a third phase of computing, after the mainframe and personal computer phases, where computing machinery is embedded, more or less invisibly, in the environments of everyday life. This is the so-called and much hyped internet of things where the iconic smartphone, along with other devices and objects, communicates with users and with other everyday devices and where now Big Data is the buzzword. This extends in specific ways the reliance on surveillance as a mode of organization. Today’s surveillance culture is informed by these developments.
Surveillance is also a major industry. Global corporations are involved, often with close links to government. The Snowden disclosures made this abundantly clear, if there was any doubt previously. The initial shock was discovering that the NSA has access to customer data from telephone companies – Verizon featured prominently in the June 2013 news – and also mines the customer databases of internet corporations such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, often referred to as the ‘big five’.24 On the one hand, such corporations engage in large-scale surveillance of their customers. And on the other, they share these data with government agencies.
Moreover, the character of the corporation connects the political economy and the culture of surveillance. The ‘big five’ corporations now dominate not only the internet but also, argues Shoshana Zuboff, the economic mode of operation. Their business model is increasingly geared to trying to predict and shape human behaviour, for revenue and market control, using Big Data techniques that frequently reduce customers to credit scores or their ‘lifetime value’. Google’s approach illustrates this objectification of persons most clearly. Explains Zuboff, this business model exhibits a ‘formal indifference’ towards both users and employees.25 Their personal situations of power or plight mean nothing. They are disposable, replaceable. At the same time, as I shall show, in a surveillance culture users’ responses to such attempted prediction and modification affect their success.
Clearly, there was already a ‘culture of control’26 evident in the later twentieth century, that morphed into the intensified security surveillance appearing after 9/11. The expansion relied heavily on recently ailing technology companies to create a new industry of ‘homeland security’.27 Securitization demands greater amounts of information about risk and how to handle it, which both weakens traditional privacy requirements and increases surveillance of what are deemed risky behaviours. In terms of surveillance culture, this reinforces the sense that surveillance is warranted, ‘for our own good’. In practice, of course, this is also understood ambivalently.
This sense of risk, and the need to take steps to reduce it, is not only evident on the grand scale of national and international policy but also penetrates daily life at home, where self-tracking for health, income, and time management is an increasing phenomenon. Only a few years ago, the New York Times still thought of this as something for ‘geeks and keep-fit addicts’.28 Today, such self-monitoring is less unusual, often taken for granted, although geeks and jocks probably still dominate the field. Wearable devices have become increasingly popular, and now talk of the ‘quantified self’ is much more commonplace.29 In this world, people seek a digitized form of ‘self-knowledge’ so that they can lead ‘better lives’ even though only a small fragment of the data is seen by them, the vast majority of the data ending up in the databases of the wearable device corporations.
Lastly, and perhaps best known, is the relation between social media and surveillance culture. Perhaps most striking among the Snowden revelations was the realization by broad swathes of the public that what happens on social media is open to both corporation and government. Jose van Dijck points out how this connects with ‘dataism’, the secular belief that users can safely entrust their data to large corporations.30 Snowden put serious dents into dataism. A recent study of Americans’ main fears shows that being tracked by corporations or government is close to the top of the list.31 It would hardly be surprising if such findings have an impact in everyday uses of social media.
Snowden’s disclosures did indeed disturb social media use.32 For example, in the United States, 34 per cent of those aware of the government surveillance programmes (or 30 per cent of all adults) have taken at least one step to hide or shield their information from the government – changing privacy settings, using other communication media than social media or avoiding certain applications. A slightly smaller proportion (25 per cent) have changed their use of phones, email or search engines following Snowden. Knowing more about government surveillance produces more evidence of changed behaviour.
Let me say one more thing about the contexts of the surveillance culture. Having commented on its relation to organizational dependence, political-economic power, security linkages and social media engagement, note that surveillance culture has many facets and varies according to region. The point of using the concept of surveillance culture is to distinguish it from notions such as surveillance state or surveillance society by focusing on the participation and engagement of surveilled and surveilling subjects.
But surveillance culture will, like any culture, develop differently and often morph unpredictably, especially in contexts of increasing social liquidity.33 It will, moreover, bud and blossom differently depending on historical and political circumstance. Here I refer primarily to North America and Western Europe, although readers in Asia, Latin America, Africa or the Middle East will recognize many features of surveillance culture, necessarily inflected by local circumstances. And surveillance culture is also expressed differently depending on gender, class, race and other such variables.
Before offering a guide to the rest of the book, let me indicate the gap that it fills. Today, many people write, talk and make films about surveillance, a situation quite different from what I experienced when I was first writing about surveillance thirty years ago. Indeed, today, many concern themselves with the cultural dimensions of surveillance. However, some who do so – including those who do so brilliantly, producing fascinating and important insights, such as Christena Nippert-Eng in the highly insightful Islands of Privacy – do not directly connect these with the larger sociological questions about surveillance.
In my work, I have always tried to comment on the cultural. But I have usually felt such a strong sense of urgency that my readers should understand the potential and actual negative impacts of surveillance that I have not lingered on the cultural aspects, even though they share in and help to mould and fashion those negative impacts. These effects of surveillance include privacy violations, the ways that surveillance undermines democratic participation and, especially, how it depends on social sorting.34 This last term highlights how surveillance works by sorting the population into categories so that different groups may be treated differently. Social sorting contributes profoundly to the distribution of life-chances and choices, to fairness or injustice. Of course, I am not saying that surveillance is intrinsically sinister or malevolent. It is not in itself good or bad, but it is never neutral either. It is ever amenable to ethical assessment. Power relations are always present, for better or for worse.
However, particularly in the past decade, with the rise of Web 2.0, the cultural has forced its way into the foreground, above all in the rise and growing ubiquity of social media and of smartphone use. It is these dimensions of social life that now underlie much common understanding of surveillance, including its more conventional kinds, such as public space surveillance cameras. These factors embed surveillance in everyday life as never before, using telltale data given off under the innocent-sounding banners of ‘user-generated content’ or ‘mobile communications’. And what is visible today is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Culture of Surveillance brings together the cultural and the political-economic, showing both how the cultural is a deeply important way of understanding surveillance and how the cultural cannot safely be seen on its own. The latter is not a separate dimension of surveillance. Today, it needs to be recognized for the increasingly important role its imaginaries and practices play in facilitating – but maybe also, in time, modifying – the structural, political-economic aspects of surveillance. Those latter aspects all too often violate privacy rights and may be unequal, unfair and unjust.
Playing Angry Birds, for example, is seen as a stress reliever and became wildly popular due to its simplicity, rewards, humour and predictability. Interacting with such a game on a mobile device while, say, commuting by bus or streetcar may be culturally represented as innocent fun. However, the game is geared by its designers to identifying and grooming those players most likely to buy-in, rather than to play for free. And that is only the consumer surveillance side. Early among the Snowden releases was a document showing how the United Kingdom’s communications security agency, GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), taps into ‘leaky apps’ such as Angry Birds for sensitive data on the age, gender, location and even sexual orientation of players.35 In this case, the cultural logic of a ‘stress-relieving game’ plays into both consumer and citizen surveillance, aspects of which are anything but.
Focusing on surveillance culture reveals the sheer complexity of surveillance today, warning against simplistic assumptions sometimes imputed to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s hapless Winston Smith versus Big Brother. The cultural dimensions of surveillance depend upon the technologies that help to sustain them, while at the same time offering the chance to challenge and shape those technologies. It is assumed that everyday life has a digital dimension; people rely on the smartphone and internet more completely than earlier generations relied on radio, TV or the telephone. By taking note of how the culture of surveillance is emerging, we may see not only how it normalizes and domesticates surveillance but also how it may contribute to the critique of surveillance and to the development of its constituent technologies for the common good. Finding technical limits and regulating through policy are essential, but at an everyday level the struggle is for hearts and minds in the mundane routines of daily, digital, life.
Here is a guide through the rest of this book, chapter by chapter. The first part of the book, chapter 1, is ‘Crucibles of culture’ and offers the conceptual clues on which the rest of the book depends. The reader may wish to skip it to get to the descriptions of surveillance culture, although you may return here to see how things hang together. I stand on others’ shoulders, and which ones will quickly become clear.
Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquidity’, for example, is a reminder of the broad context of shifts within capitalist modernity, while those representing culture-as-everyday-life demonstrate the need to work within an interpretive tradition to grasp our own roles within the wider society. The Snowden disclosures illustrate the link. The shock of discovering how far government agencies monitor citizens’ lives is matched by seeing how businesses are involved and by realizing that it is our own metadata36 that fuel such surveillance.
Unfortunately, like many such ‘shocks’, people seem to recover from them without recognizing their deeper consequences. The very name, Edward Snowden, became a blur for many, a vague and fading memory of how overreaching security agencies were embarrassingly exposed. But if memories could be jolted it would be clearer that responding to surveillance and even initiating surveillance affects outcomes on a macro-scale within the milieu of the digital and the pressures to perform. Visibility always exhibits more than one face. The same person dearly desires and simultaneously shrinks from visibility. In the end, though I foreground visibility, I shall also ask if ‘recognition’ is in some ways more significant.
The second part of the book comprises three chapters exploring the main cultural currents of surveillance. It starts with the big picture of attitudes towards more conventional surveillance, moves through the growing taken-for-grantedness of surveillance in our lives and on to the everyday world of immersion in the offline-online world in which our feelings about surveillance have turned from doubt to desire. This part thus has a historical ring to it, but these cultures of surveillance are all also contemporary. As well, they may sound as if they offer explanations of why we comply so readily with surveillance, but I also stress the ways in which each may cause us to complain or to comport ourselves differently.
Chapter 2, ‘From convenience to compliance’, may sound like something from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World rather than from Orwell. After all, his dystopia was one of soft surveillance in which consuming was paramount and taking ‘soma’ helped one to escape reality. But whichever account is read, there is a tension between what might be thought of as the surveillance system and popular responses to it. The ‘system’ prompts performances that vary considerably depending on many factors. Whatever the new configurations of surveillance, now integrated with the internet, personal information is a much sought-after commodity. These ubiquitous data are desired for both control and commerce and in many cases those categories are not entirely separate. Patterns of power exist in the world of surveillance but the outcomes are very varied depending on cultural and historical differences. Cultures of surveillance develop differently depending on differing political economies and post-authoritarian – such as in the former German Democratic Republic – or colonial pasts.
What cultures of surveillance have in common is that surveillance simplifies social sorting and that the public’s growing knowledge of this creates feedback loops and makes a practical difference. Among other responses, surveillance generates caution, if not fear, an insight found, for instance, in the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan. For him, the ‘gaze’ creates anxieties from earliest childhood.37 At the same time, others are reassured by surveillance, believing that it keeps them safe from crime, violence or terrorist attack. The longing to have ‘someone to watch over me’ may also spring from childhood experiences, even though in adult life it may be a prescription for a dangerous dependence.38
The emotional dimensions of surveillance are expressed in many different ways. As the growing reliance of contemporary economic growth on gathering and analysing personal data – pundits proclaim Big Data as the ‘new oil’ – becomes ever more apparent, so levels of concern and of compliance are likely to deepen. Especially since Snowden, those concerns are also bound up with security surveillance, which often has particularly negative implications for visible minorities. But the compliance is also likely to become more commonplace simply because of the convenience of using the internet and the devices from which data are drawn.
Chapter 3, ‘From novelty to normalization’, demonstrates how surveillance, because it is embedded in the routines of daily life, becomes, as it were, part of the furniture – sometimes literally. The latest smartphone or tablet will contain bells and whistles not previously encountered. But each one requires decisions about if or how it will be used. And those decisions depend in turn on what is thought to be beneficial, productive, risky or whatever. In other words, they must be assessed against the kinds of norms that have developed as the digital realm has expanded. Qualms may be expressed about the new potentials. Or maybe the new will seem like a logical next step in data-driven evolution, something quickly taken for granted.
A defining feature of surveillance cultures is the state of technology which enables new cultural forms to gestate. The use of interactive and ‘smart’ technologies shifts the focus from fixed to fluid surveillance, from hardware to software. The smart meter for domestic electricity can tell what TV programmes you are watching. This is a mundane aspect of the ‘internet of things’. Your smartphone logs your location and your ‘likes’ as well as whom you contact. And if their use becomes widespread, self-driving cars will also transmit your data to numerous sites – ‘for your safety’.
In 2017 a controversy arose over Roomba, the smart vacuum cleaner from iRobot. The machine maps the details of the home in order to enable a full cleaning routine to occur. A slightly inaccurate article gave the impression that such maps might be sold to technology companies such as Apple or Google. A minor media storm ensued as many worried that domestic privacy would be infringed, which evoked a response from iRobot, stating unequivocally that its customer data would never be sold.39 Such disputes are now the stuff of daily tussles.
All this occurs within a wider cultural context in which gauging risk and opportunity is central, anticipating the future is a key goal, and of course where economic prosperity and state security are locked in a mutual embrace. The result? Smart surveillance and social sorting go hand in glove. Every mouse click, web search or text message gives off data exhaust that is used to create profiles which in turn score and rank users, placing them in consequential categories. Subtly, smart surveillance and social sorting inform and inspire surveillance imaginaries and practices, which in turn help to enable or constrain the further development of smart surveillance. Whether it is wearables in the workplace or appliances in the home, data are domesticated. How attitudes and actions develop in relation to this makes the difference between simply seeing surveillant environments as convenient and comfortable – or as challenging and contestable.
In chapter 4, the trilogy of angles on surveillance culture is completed by exploring ‘From online to onlife’. Of all today’s devices, smartphones are the most omnipresent, but many others, including wearable ones for fitness or health, are also in view here. The particular set of issues examined in this chapter concerns what it means to be immersed in life online and how this affects what is meant by being ‘human’. It is about the subjective experiences that make up digitally dependent lives today. While the idea of being online is commonplace, it has become increasingly moot as more and more people do things, live their lives, online.
As the line between offline and online dissolves, software-driven devices have receded into the background. Socio-technical living spaces now feature devices – from fridges that remember to robot vacuums that ‘know’ the room they are cleaning – that are so integrated as to have a taken-for-grantedness that makes them a seemingly natural part of the lived environment. Because of this, the back end, where data are collected, disclosed and used by corporations, is really hard to see, let alone fully grasp in terms of consequences for people in those living spaces. The popular celebration of convenience, comfort and congeniality of social media appears to contribute to the apparent complacency.
The notion of ‘onlife’, coined by Luciano Floridi, was the subject of a European Community investigation discussed as the Onlife Manifesto.40 It raises questions about how the sense of identity, relationships, reality and agency are mutating, and of course these have a strong bearing on surveillance, too. Now, surveillance often sparks responses relating to ‘privacy’. This relates especially to state surveillance that makes being watched seem negative, undesirable. Some wish to escape, to hide, or just to be ‘private’. But this seems myopic in a world of mass media and now social media, because the world of performance and celebrity makes being seen a matter of privilege, of desire. And if the chance for Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame was limited to TV, social media opens the floodgates.
The consequences for surveillance are far-reaching – from the unwanted eye to welcome watching. But in fact, these two belong together. In many cases, the welcome watching of performance is choreographed by what might otherwise be considered the unwanted eye. The link between personal performance, celebrity and surveillance is mediated by the corporate structure of the technology. Performances are not, after all, as spontaneous as they may seem. A subtle steering mechanism designed into the software by commercial imperatives prepares the way. The desire to be seen is no less real for all that and the performances may well be improvised, but one has to ask who built the set and encouraged the actors to take the stage.
The desire to be seen is thought by some to be narcissistic or even promiscuous – wanting to be visible to all and sundry. But it may equally be a deliberate practice of positioning oneself in a favourable light in order to achieve some basic and limited goals. Such intentional exposure – skilfully analysed by Erving Goffman in the 1950s41 – is also seen in the desire to self-surveill using devices often dubbed the ‘quantified self’. Here, self-tracking and life logging are central. Seen by some as a mode of self-reinvention, this may also be construed as capitulation to a sense of the self as commodity. At the same time, such desires may also help to naturalize and legitimate surveillance of all kinds, to encourage new modes of cooperation of the surveilled with their surveillors. Emerging surveillance imaginaries and practices evidence both kinds of possible outcomes.
In Part III, the final two chapters of the book consider what the culture of surveillance means for alternative futures, for ethics and for politics. We start with chapter 5, ‘Total transparency’, which uses Dave Eggers’ The Circle as a springboard into further consideration of where the culture of surveillance may be leading. Change does often occur at dizzying speed, which prompts a turn to other sources for a larger sense of context. This novel, and to an extent the film42 based on it, offers a contemporary fictional account of surveillance cultures, through the prism of an all-encompassing Silicon Valley corporation.
The novel follows the progress of Mae, a new employee at The Circle, as she enthusiastically embraces each technique of total transparency, persuaded that ‘privacy is theft’ and that wanting to be seen is natural; proof that she exists. The novel’s themes connect with various studies mentioned in this book, such as Nippert-Eng’s Islands of Privacy and Marwick’s ‘social surveillance’, and prompt debate over the true state of ‘visibility’ as a key question of the culture of surveillance. The question of visibility is in fact a basic issue in all surveillance, presented not only in photo images that have bloomed beyond the wildest dreams of their nineteenth-century inventors, but also in the metaphorical ‘seeing’ done with data. For example, performance-based ranking is also clearly in evidence in The Circle – as it also is in the ‘Nosedive’ episode of Black Mirror – now achieved not merely by the large impersonal organization but also by fellow workers, who score and rank each other. The biggest question is how far The Circle is utopian and how far dystopian?
Whatever the answer, surveillance culture not only helps us see how things are. It also opens a window on how things could be or should be. In chapter 6, ‘Hidden hope’, we see how surveillance imaginaries yield clues about the dynamics but also the duties of surveillance. Here we turn the lens from the one to the other. What might be some guides for considering the everyday ethics of surveillance – and might they also offer insights into surveillance on the very large scale? What actually occurs is always contextual, and thus our sought-for ethics requires a certain fluidity and flexibility.
Unfortunately, many matters technological are often treated as if they themselves are beyond ethics, in a world that ethics does not reach. They are treated as if they are exempt from ethical demands or insights. The pressure to perform online underscores the drive to get results, making it easy to forget that the results may as easily enhance or erase the common good. So the first task is a reminder that devices and data are not somehow morally neutral but are already implicated in activities and institutions that have to be judged on whether they promote or support good or evil.
In our case we should ask what prompts surveillance activities and how they fit on a spectrum of care-and-control – where they may also blur or overlap – or within contexts of other social relationships at home, work, school or play. Could one conceive of ‘good gazing’ as being surveillance-for rather than merely surveillance-of the other?43 This requires some radically different thinking that places the person first, before personal data, and it is a properly ethical matter, not reducible to techniques for deciding what is best for this or that individual. It is a matter for public debate and deliberation.
Chapter 6 continues by revisiting the notion of surveillance practices. Once more, we find that surveillance practices are both responsive and initiatory. They evidence a certain kind of practical politics for an information-intensive world where data have become a source of both economic and political power. If ‘good gazing’ can be worked out in relation to fitbits, dashcams and home security systems, might this also work on a larger scale?
Much debate over surveillance, approached within abstract Western thought, focuses on legal ‘harms’ and modes of regulation. But how might wider questions of rights and responsibilities – based on that sense of humanness already mentioned – be worked out politically in the context of a reframed digital democracy? Again, if we examine actual practices that are currently appearing within digital domains, it is possible to find clues as to where things could go. This could be depressingly familiar if the filter bubbles continue to grow, courtesy of social media. But there are available alternatives, ones that still allow for conversation and debate over visibility, transparency and their connection with the common good.