This second part of the book explores surveillance culture as an emerging phenomenon within the familiar worlds of surveillance. In chapter 2, ‘From convenience to compliance’, the kinds of surveillance carried out by government organizations, police and corporations are shown to be the soil within which new surveillance imaginaries and practices are growing today. The traveller at the airport or the internet user at the screen is not necessarily aware of surveillance from the outset. Once aware, however, the dawning realization forms itself into some section of the surveillance imaginary.
Once there, the imaginary informs future action, which may produce anything from compliance to contestation. Most will grasp the fact that the means of control and influence are vital characteristics of state and corporate surveillance even though the precise mechanisms by which they operate are largely unknown to them. The responses are to the experience of surveillance rather than to intimate knowledge of how it may affect them. The development of surveillance culture – especially through performance – produces possibilities for more nuanced and reflective responses to the patterns of power that predominate.
Chapter 3, ‘From novelty to normalization’, offers a similar analysis, in this case focusing on the ways that the appearance of a new surveillance culture is in part stimulated by the ubiquitous information infrastructure and the diffusion of digital platforms in today’s world. Today’s surveillance culture cannot be understood without remarking on the familiarity of things digital – they are taken for granted, normal, routine, domesticated – along with the surveillance mechanisms that they support and animate. As they become part of everyday life, so they contribute to the culture of surveillance.
This pattern continues into chapter 4, ‘From online to onlife’, where normalized aspects of surveillance culture may be viewed not just as a necessary evil, like airport security, but as something that may be enjoyable, desirable, even fun. The selfie is perhaps the archetypical illustration of this, where not only do participants welcome the watching eye of others but they also provide their own images and video for consumption by others. These offer the means that will contribute to the enjoyment of being watched, recognized and even celebrated, or at least ‘liked’. Context turns out to be crucial; some watching eyes are as unwelcome, and read as intrusive or malevolent, as others are embraced and seen as adjuncts to identity and a positive self-image.