Considering surveillance as cultural imaginaries and practices places debates over surveillance in the realm of everyday life and not just in the high-level world of businesses and government agencies, critically important though that world is for surveillance. Our social and cultural worlds are the products of conflicting currents, opposing flows. Of emotions, play, commitments and experiences.
The towering institutions and processes of high technology and global government that seem to overshadow our daily life-paths are not relentless and invincible. Opportunities still exist not only to slow the pace of the blundering beast but also to tame and even humanize some of its activities. To deny human agency is to deny hope.
The notion of ‘co-creation’ may be illustrated by the ways in which, after Snowden, millions of ordinary internet and cellphone users became aware that their own imaginaries and practices are implicated in today’s surveillance. The internet is itself a mutating assemblage that is subject not only to corporate and government pressures but also to the activities of ordinary people, often acting in concert, sometimes contributing constructively to its reimagination and reshaping.
Here we look first at a fictional world – eerily on the edge of ours – where total transparency is not merely the organizational goal, but where ordinary participants join in willingly and even enthusiastically to the heightened visibility of the digital world. Many themes reappear: the convenience that conceives compliance along with dwindling calls for caution, the online personae and performances that mark online involvement, the novelties that are normalized or that help to reassure that other kinds of surveillance are acceptable, and the ways that the self is subtly shaped and identities formed through seemingly innocent innovations that feed fascination and drive desire.
Reading The Circle offers the chance to decide for ourselves how far to go with transparency, given that, in a sense, today’s users too are already, inevitably, part of the digital world portrayed there. How do the novel’s characters comply, cope with or question the seductive and subtle surveillance situations that are the nub of the novel? How do we – the readers – decide whether utopian or dystopian perspectives are appropriate for our times?
Then finally, we consider new surveillance imaginaries and practices to figure out what a culture of ‘good gazing’ might look like. And this is no abstract, armchair reflection, either. Surveillance imaginaries are constructed from many sources, and in the activities of younger users of social media, among others, worthwhile approaches are already being developed. What are the components of a constructively critical way of developing surveillance imaginaries?
Participation is increasingly commonplace. But what sort of participation works best to promote practices geared to digital democracy, the common good and human flourishing? Earlier language offered us privacy and data protection. How far do these still speak to today’s surveillance world and in what ways might it be necessary to go beyond them?