I have surveillance on my mind; my mind is a mess.

What I mean is that I’m considering : ruminating on, you know? : competing claims & competing (stories about) realities of surveillance & technology : a few of which come from some very articulate bloggers. What I mean is that I have a handful of knotted hyperlinks & a short stack of books, footnoted, in a small room. Not to mention an empty blog in which I can try to talk to myself about this.

(Familiar with the White Stripes’ ditty “Little Room”? It occurs to me that these new Web technologies are helping us solve the timeless dilemma Jack White poses in that song;

“Well you’re in your little room /and you’re working on something good /but if it’s really good /you’re gonna need a bigger room /and when you’re in the bigger room /you might not know what to do /you might have to think of / how you got started sitting in your little room.”

Here I am, in a small cluttered room, feeling a little squashed by the stack of articles at my feet, the print&bound editions books at my elbows. But - ah! - I found out about RSS feeds, & RSS readers, & my del.icio.us - & things are beginning to clear up. I may never have to leave this little room after all. But all this is beside the point.)

: COMPETING CLAIMS :

My knowledge & understanding of the claims being made about social import of user-generated content is partial, in more than one sense of the word. (1) I can’t claim “ethnographic authority” in the composition of these claims; I have been reading blogs & blogging for a little over a month now. & (2) I’m involved in a sociology department that emphasizes power-reflexive methods; such reflexiveness will, you can probably guess, position me on a particular half of the continuum of optimism/pessimism about the social uses & effects of the Web.

That said, the competing claims, as I see them this afternoon, go a little something like this.

(1) Web 2.0 democratizes public discourse.

This is the most optimistic narrative about Web 2.0. The basis for this optimism is the explosion of access to &, following from that, participation in the media. It is this understanding of new media that Time magazine expressed when it named “You.” its Person of the Year; You, the magazine claimed, were busy during 2006 “seizing the reins of the global media,” “founding and framing the new digital democracy,” and “working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

(2) The democratization of the media democratizes democracy.

Tiara.org cleverly points out that Americans don’t live in a direct democracy, so this claim really means that “political participation” increases in “meaningful ways.”

Evidence? :

• Jennifer Earl, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that the Web both facilitates offline protest & replaces it, becoming a venue of activism. (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link.)
• Politicians might just be more afraid of bloggers than they are of Catholics!
  
• The accessibility of technologies of surveillance allows for the surveillance of authority.

There are smart & important discussions of the types of democracy that emerge from the Web : see, for example: tiara.org’s skepticism & Swarming Media’s hyper-democracy. Specifically, though, the final claim about surveillance is what interests me most. It’s at this point that I notice the turn from optimism to pessimism.

(3) Democratic surveillance is no democracy at all.

In a previous post, I cite William G. Staples thoughts on this. They’re worth repeating here, since they’re exemplary.

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

Of course, simply because access to surveillant technologies increases does not mean that the uses of it are equalized. Again, tiara.org’s blog is informative; the promise, she writes, of Web 2.0 to provide filtered, personalized content is tethered to “behavioral marketing” practices. (In my imagination, my meandering entry on Cymfony & data mining buttresses tiara.org’s concise critique of this marketing strategy.)

This kind of surveillance seems benign - a perfection, of sorts, of marketing techniques that we’ve already accepted; Staples, in fact, refers to it as “soft” surveillance. This doesn’t signal the end of “harder” forms of surveillance; surveillance that seeks to uncover deviance & wrong-doing continues. &, given the ambiguities about standards of decency & obscenity & given the breakdown of a strict difference between real & fantasy : what constitutes real, digital child pornography, for example? : & given the diversification & saturation of technologies, these forms of surveillance frequently expand their “field of visibility” in order to increase their efficiency.

(4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

According to Swarming Media, participatory media generates a new, self-regulated self.

According to me, a critique of contemporary surveillance must account for the pleasures derived from mass participation in it.

& it’s on this : the pleasures of surveillance : that I’ll conclude this entry : GPS shoes make people findable : because find-ability is safe-ability : the dream of a perfect visible :

EP