Wal-Mart can catch you (wants to catch you!) missing your secret lover & the NYTimes will run the “embarrasing email.” & I’ll spread the love.

“I miss you ridiculously,” began one of the e-mail messages from Ms. Roehm to Mr. Womack. “I hate not being able to call you or write you. I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.”

(Bare-Knuckle Enforcement for Wal-Mart’s Rules)

EP

This entry features the grand-daddy of American privacy, Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’ “The Right to Privacy.”

Today, this defense of privacy is in the public domain. You can read it here. You can read of it here, here, or, well, everywhere.

Given that this is a well-researched and frequently discussed law document, I’ll keep my comments here to a minimum.

Firstly, it came to me as something of a surprise that Warren and Brandeis’ defense of privacy is based not on the (familiar) fear of a police-state (see Big Brother State). Instead, Warren and Brandeis center their discussion on something a bit more subtle, but, now, a bit more urgent, the challenge that technological development pose to “private and domestic life.”

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right “to be let alone.” Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed form the house-tops.”

(Prescient, huh?)

Developments to the camera, for example, render impotent the legal conception of privacy as centered on a notion of contract. Warren and Brandeis note that

While, for instance, the state of the photographic art was such that one’s picture could seldom be taken without his consciously “sitting” for the purpose, the law of contract or of trust might afford the prudent man sufficient safeguards against the improper circulation of his portrait; but since the latest advances in photographic art have rendered it possible to take pictures surreptitiously, the doctrines of contract and of trust are inadequate to support the required protection.

So, if not a contractual or property based right, what is the right to privacy? For the writers, as near as this non-law student can tell, it is the right to “an inviolate personality,” or “the belief that a human being’s innermost convictions, communications and tastes were private, to be protected from monarchs and governments as well as prying gossip.”

So, as near as I can tell, that’s it.   Except, well, when thinking about the Web & privacy : “the right to privacy ceases upon the publication of the facts by the individual, or with his consent.”

It is fairly clear that we can extrapolate an argument for Warren and Brandeis’ “The Right to Privacy” against the infiltration of other people’s digital cameras and camera phones into our daily lives.  But when we put something online, in a FaceBook profile, for example, are we publishing our inviolate personalities?  And what to do we do with all those other breaches of privacy, the one’s not put to use to gossip about us (Warren and Brandeis rail against gossip!) or publicize us, but to get to know us … our habits … for the sake of selling to us better?

A) Dunno
B) Dunno
C) Dunno

Today’s entry on privacy features Bruce Schneier’s article “The Eternal Value of Privacy,” which ran in Wired News in May of 2006.

I said in my last entry that I am going to withhold critical commentary on these different figurations of privacy.  I am forcing myself to stick to that promise.  Well, I’m saying that out one side of my mouth, but out of the other I’m saying that Schneir’s article contains a number of alarm-inducing words, phrases, & claims :  “inherent human right,” “human condition,” &, especially when referring to lives the framers of our Constitution lived, “You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.”

I’ll leave it at that; you can let your own, lil’ imagination run wild with sociologically informed critiques of Schneier’s logic.

That said, Schneier’s article is interesting in that it offers no explanation or justification for the use of surveillance.  The Big Brother State video begins with the logic of those who use (& celebrate) strategies & technologies of surveillance.  Schneier does not entertain that logic.

Moreover, Schneier quickly dismisses the notion that the protection of privacy is about “hiding a wrong.”  No, privacy is an inherent human right; the dignity of the human condition is dependent on the protection of privacy.

Schneier attempts to situate the debate about privacy within American Constitutional history.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

Does the historicization of privacy contradict Schneier’s claim that privacy is inherent or intrinsic to anything?  Perhaps, but that’s another post.

I think that the important development in Schneier’s article is in his concluding remarks.  The debate about privacy should not be had in terms of security versus privacy, but privacy versus control.  Why?  Well, this gets to the heart of why Schneier believes privacy matters.

Without privacy, individuals become

children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

The surveyed individual, or the potentially-surveyed individual, becomes compliant - first, briefly halting & considering whether there was somebody there, watching, but then quickly laughing about his paranoia.  Later, though, perhaps our demeanor changes.  & then freedom flees . . .

Convinced?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Maybe so

Please circle one and then discuss.

EP

Recently, a friend asked me to explain why privacy matters. That’s the question, right, on which a critique of surveillance must be built?

In response to that question, I intend to use the next few entries here to offer a (non-critical, at least initially) summation of what others out there, including bloggers, journalists, and a few wayward Supreme Court Justices, have to say about privacy & surveillance.

I start with Big Brother State’s well produced, though largely atheoretical, animation on surveillance.

In the video, surveillance is explained in two ways.

The first figuration is associated with politicians “assigned to security matters today,” who might, if you’d ask them, justify surveillance technologies and techniques as integral strategies of crime deterrence and prevention. Closed circuit camera systems, it seems, win over the hearts and minds of would-be criminals. Trusted computing keeps the nasty internet-transmitted-diseases off your computer. And police surveillance of emails and phone calls allows the cops to catch the bad guys.

“It would probably all sound great, because the idea is that you should start thinking of these techniques as cream of the crop. But let’s face the not quite so obvious, but nonetheless omnipresent downside of all this.”

Public cameras allow police to keep a database of “all of your” (read: anyone’s) movements.

Airline securities - record keeping on passengers & biometrics - allow the secret services of many nations to produce records of all passengers. These records could potentially include “explicit” information, including eye color, fingerprints, and a “high-resolution picture of your face,” all of which is “information you would usually expect to be taken from suspected criminals.” (You’re not a suspected criminal, are you? Because if you are…)

Trusted computing prevents the computer user from deciding what programs should be installed on their own machine.

Finally, and most dramatically, the police could potentially access your emails and phone calls to obtain information … that you, well, might not just want them to access, namely your sexual relations. (The sexual relations are left unspoken, but implied through animation.)

In the film’s conclusion, these forms of repressive law, justified by the “public fear of terror,” are symptomatic of Western society’s transformation into a police state.

Convinced?

(a) Yes
(b) No
(c) Maybe so

Please circle only one, then discuss.

Note : What follows should NOT be considered a definitive or accurate depiction of ANT.  I finished reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social today and am still ruminating on it.

What can ANTs tell us about online surveillance?

Literally, nothing.  In a stylized dialog with a graduate student, Bruno Latour tells the confused, probably overworked graduate researcher that actor-network-theory (ANT) does not apply to any case study or research site or sociological concern.  Later, Professor Latour comments

Surely you’d agree that drawing with a pencil is not the same thing as drawing the shape of a pencil.  It’s the same with this ambiguous word: network.  With Actor-Network you may describe something that doesn’t at all look like a network – an individual state of mind, a piece of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a network – subways, sewages, telephones- which is not all drawn in an ‘Actor-Networky’ way.  You are simply confusing the object with the method.  ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it.  (Latour 2005:142)

Latour’s introduction to ANT, Reassembling the Social, contributes to social theory and to method, but at the end of the (occasionally baffling, occasionally brilliant) text I know nothing substantive about what world the ANT researcher should constuct.  This is what Latour means when he says that ANT is “mostly a negative” method.  ANT’s concepts are socially voided; though agent and network and “plug-in” mean something within the method they are not (supposed to be) maps of the social world. For example, (and to brutalize ANT), a network is as big or small as it is.  This approach forgoes a priori definitions of group size or micro and macro “forces.”

What I find most useful about ANT is that it vacuums up the social; in other words, it offers an alternative method of sociology that does not assume that social structures, social constructs, or social forces dilly-dally behind interactions.  It is strange for me to celebrate a sociological method that kills off the social.  After all, I just spent days on an email conversation with friends arguing about the social construction of knowledge and perception. 

Thing is, I largely agree with Latour when he writes that the mobilization of a social explanation of a phenomena largely obscures that actual practices involved in the making of that phenomena. 

This does not mean that we are all free, rational individuals radically uninvolved with this thing that used to be called the social.  Latour actually describes us as puppets, but he means it in the best of ways.  Actors – which are both human and non-human – are involved (caught?) in a web of relations with other actors.

It is all very interesting and I’d like to get to know ANT better, but I want to focus on in this entry is a exchange between the Professor of ANT (P) and the graduate student (S) on the topic of the visible and invisible.

S : But what about invisible entities acting in some hidden ways?
P : If they act, they leave some trace.  And then you will have some information, then you can talk about them.  If not, just shut up.
S : But what if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P : Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without brining in proof of their presence.  That proof might be indirect, farfetched, complicated, but you need it.  Invisible things are invisible.  Period.  If they make things move, and you can document those moves, then they are visible.
S : Proof?  What is a proof anyway?  Isn’t that terribly positivistic?
P : I hope so, yes. What’s so great about saying that things are acting whose existence you can’t prove?  I am afraid you are confusing social theory with conspiracy theory – although these days most of critical social science comes down to that.  (2005:150)

To be clear, Latour does not deny the existence of ghosts and their brethren.  He implores social scientists to count an actor’s accounts of events, actions, motives, including those informed by spectral forces … say God or the ghost of some influential theorist.  The catch is that that ghostly actor has to leave a trace.  Sociologists are not allowed, when using ANT, to presume the presence of a structure, a false consciousness, etc., that hides behind the actor.

Which brings me to surveillance.  As I note in my previous entry, I’m beginning to consider the questions and sites and methods with which I can construct a dissertation.  I like what ANT does to the social, would like to know it better, &, perhaps, would like to use it in (not apply it to!) my research. 

In The Simulation of Surveillance, William Bogard writes that

Since earliest times, the exercise of surveillance has been dependent on masking. […] At the same time, masks are precisely what surveillance strips from its object.  Surveillance, we shall see, is all about breaking through surfaces of appearance, closing gaps between appearance and reality, practices which themselves demand stealth, deception, and attention to controlling appearances.  (1996:20)

So what can ANT do with actors who, by definition, mask, if not actually erase, the proof of their presence? 

All I can come up with so far is :

Beginning with the actors - FaceBook users or bloggers, for examples – the ANT researcher can initially ignore the question of what the surveyor is doing.  However, rather than assume that the invisible presence of a marketer, or the invisible presence of a university administrator, is internalized by the web user, who reflexively acts in accordance with that internalized observer, the ANT researcher can pay attention to how that web user acts within a collective of blogs and bloggers, computers, private and public spaces, articles that s/he does or doesn’t read on internet privacy, knowledge of those surveyors, etc. 

The ANT researcher might find … and if s/he does find it, is forced to accept that … the observers out there, even if nefarious or authoritative, are not part of certain web users’ collectives.

If that is the case, does that mean surveillance is impotent or doesn’t matter?  No, but it would mean that we cannot assume, despite coming-to-age with Foucault’s panopticon or Orwell’s Big Brother, or, even, Goffman’s presentation of self, how surveillance matters.

Maybe.  I think I have probably fumbled ANT & its concepts pretty badly.  But it’s a start, huh?

EP

It has only been a few days since I last posted, but my scaredy-cat city has gone berserk. This time, though, we’ve managed to keep the lunacy in the newspapers. Yes, this time, we color our fears with smudges of printed ink, rather than with that peculiar Mooninite glow.

What the heck am I talking about?

T H I S :
2.21.2007 : The Boston Phoenix : Facing off over Facebook : Who’s Looking at You, Kid?
2.23.2007 : The Boston Globe : Beware the land minds in new media
2.25.2007 : The Boston Globe : Managing your online persona becomes a key career skill

Consider yourself warned, I guess : watch your back, etc : because someone’s coming for you.

It seem to me that this coverage represents something of a backlash to the popularity of Web technologies - FaceBook & MySpace, in particular. More than that, though, it seems to signal a backlash to the indifference Web users have about the ways that the information : their online personas, etc : can be accessed, used, & used to incriminate them.

I’m reminded of Jackie Orr’s genealogy of panic disorder, in which the sociologist pays attention to the production of panic during the Cold War. No doubt Orr’s analysis is of a situation more dire : maybe, closer to our Y2003 duct-tape panic : than this current panic web . . . s i t u a t i o n we’ve got our selves into, but that doesn’t disqualify the comparison.

I don’t have my copy of Orr’s book around : nope, it’s in Minnesota : but my memory of her chapter on the Cold War, “‘Keep Calm’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient” goes something like this : armed with only the meager technologies of the media & real bombs, dropped on some simulated Anytown, U . S . A., our politicians & military men waged a battle for the our psyche, which was : most of the time : politically indifferent to mushroom clouds & other doomsday imagery. During a cold War, this indifference was a liability . . . was evidence that the threat-from-Out-There wasn’t understood; so through all sorts of scare-tactics, the federal government attempted to mold a bold, new citizen : prepared for the worst-case-scenario, but, through the processes of preparation, fixated on the severity of the scenario.

Now, while I acknowledge the gap in severity : a bad resume ain’t nothing like a mushroom could : it’s time to bring this back to the Web.

It seems that we have an indifferent population, that’ll say what it thinks & mean what it says & will give out all sorts of incriminating evidence online, no matter the consequences. & this population isn’t panicking, isn’t holding back, isn’t, to paraphrase one of the classics, bothering all that much with the presentation of the online self in their everyday, online lives. Perhaps, as the two Boston Globe articles suggest, this is a population that wants to live with (not in) a past : that doesn’t want to play some game of cultural amnesia, forgetting all the messy loose ends.

So if we need some order, if we need to (re)consolidate the voices that matter, why not watch them where it hurts : make moves on their attempts to acquire an education (see the Phoenix article) & a job.

& so it goes, so it goes : . . .

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are — and what they are doing to mess up their resume? Follow the cybertrail.

EP

To celebrate the fact that I’m generally behind the times when it comes to tracking down & reading blogs, I’m linking to a good entry by David Brake of Media @ LSE on the concerns parents have about their children’s web use. I’m about seven months late on this entry, but, given some of the articles & discussions to which I’ve linked lately, David’s mid-July entry remains relevant. Brake takes a matter of fact approach in his discussion, noting that

Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’.

Brake adds two links to some other entries he has written on issues of privacy & surveillance. Both are worth reading.

EP

Four days after offering up “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” New York Magazine gives us this (intentionally) mis-titled piece :
“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Internet Exhibitionists.”

“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy” posited that the Web habits of children, teenagers, & 20-somethings erode the (illusionary) border between private lives & public spectacle.   But this is a double-border : or so the article’s story goes : between these spaces & between child & the parent.

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Enter the toy-makers, who can hook parents up with all sorts of filtering & surveillance devices that can keep the bad things out : namely, the pedophile : but, according to the authors of “Mama, Dont’ Let Your Babies…” can’t (yet) get at what seems to really be irking parents  :

But, still, we can’t help wondering what the point is. Isn’t it just a matter of time till these kids are showing themselves off to the world, anyway?

&, still, I can’t help wondering what the point is.  Isn’t one of the concerns that youngsters already enjoy the allure of the audience & spectacle of the Web?  So why add another audience?

Now, I know it’s one thing to have an audience of online friends & another to have a parent (or teacher) watching.  But, according to “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” even the meaning of that difference is diminishing.

Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” says Kitty Ostapowicz, laughing. “But I’ve always said I wouldn’t ever put up anything I wouldn’t want my mother to see.”

&, anyway, don’t these toys just accelerate the erosion of the private? & confuse that  erosion with play?

EP

I was raised in house on a “half-mile stretch of narrow road in the shadow of the Shawangunk Ridge,” where “our past, our present and our future collide and struggle to somehow co-exist.” Today, no matter the cul-de-sacs, no matter the acres of (zoned) sub-divisions, landing hi-speed Internet requires persistence. You need to harangue cable companies : get them to explain; inevitably, though, we’re told that the necessary equipment - the cables or whatever - stop running a half-mile from the home, in either directions. It’s up-hill both ways, or something like that.

In the late ’90s, no one missed hi-speed Internet because most of us hadn’t yet been exposed to it. In the late ’90s, from the fringes of most meaningful, high school cliques, I took to the Web, putting up crappy pages & engaging in non-sense debates in my local newspaper’s forum.

Yes, before I had landed my first kiss, I’d landed my first url. Both, I’m not afraid to admit, were sloppy as hell. Those old geocities site addresses invoked ancient architecture; my first web page was housed in Geocitie’s “Colosseum.”

In the late ’90s, my peers were emailing & instant messaging, but they were certainly not forging robust online identities. But then the Web changed. Many of us moved into dorms at colleges, learned what an Ethernet cord was, learned we didn’t have to dial-up, & learned that none of us had to contribute to what must have been an outlandish-electricity bill. We kept our computers on 24/7.

More importantly, whenever our computers were on, AIM was on. Profiles became personal ad-space for the witty & profound. Away messages proved one of two things : you had somewhere to be or you were groping for a slogan that made it sound like you had somewhere to be.

From the fringes from all meaningful social cliques, I groped for slogans that made it sound like I had somewhere better to be. (But then the Web changed.) My one-or-two line away messages - quotable quotes, of sorts - earned me a fan-club of AIM nobodies. Not of automated, virus-ridden messages … those came later, but of AIM buddies I neither knew nor knew were looking. One day, one of them messaged me, complimenting my away messages & letting me know that s/he had friends who also kept me on their buddy list just to read my aways.

So there was an audience; sometimes anonymous, sometimes not. (Before the RIAA infiltrated file-sharing networks & freaked university ITS’s out, students who shared the densest & most eccentric mixes of music were minor-celebrities; if you ran into one, you’d be genuinely excited & refer to them by their network computer name.) &, by offering their attention, these audiences could elevate an online contribution to something greater than the mundaneness from which it emerged. (Or, at least, that’s where my away messages came from.)

In other words, when the Web changed, it was time for popular kids to ransack the fringe’s bandwidth.

I woke up this morning, to read again about the day the Web changed. This time, the narrative came at from me a New York Magazine feature “Say Anything.” (Tiara.org directed her readers, including this one, to that link.)

“Say Anything” is an eight (web)page sojourn through the generational gap between the prophets & junkies of Web 2.0 & their parents. In what might be the most profound passage of the feature, the latter - the parents, hand-wringers, ITS administrators, & surveillance studies professors - are the insane ones.

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

This is an eloquent & compelling defense of our Web habits. Surveillance is nothing new. Orwell, we know, sensed 1984 in 1949. & it was in 1965 that Bob Dylan warned that the “phone’s tapped anyway.”

(Then again, it’s been 42 years since he warned us that the vandals took all the handles & that hasn’t come to pass…)

Of course, this defense (or excuse?) for Web habits, as well as cultural attitudes about them, ignores, as both tiara.org & Kenneth Rufo point out, the context in which : who? teenagers : FaceBook, MySpace, & YouTube : politicians : market researchers : off privacy.

This is not to say that to put an address or name or image online is only naive or is really that much more exposing than the pieces of us we leave (or have taken from us) during our day-to-day.

It is to say that this article, as entertaining as it might & as littered with hip-looking teenagers & 20-somethings as it might be &, especially in its discussion of the changing face(s) of fame, as profound as it might be, ignores the efforts of a whole lot of political, social, technological, & corporate forces to develop the webscape of privacy.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound(?)

A final thought. If you read the New York Magazine article pay attention to how “old” ways of doing gender creep into this story. See, especially : the (now) familiar story about the sex tape : in this article, at least, always released by a man : who, apparently, has nothing to lose in exposing how he performs sex : to the detriment - or gain, as the case may be - of a woman. It’s not new, nor surprising, but it’s there. Just another “symbolic edifice … as structuring principle” (to again quote Kenneth Rufo) that points us to the intensity & expense at which the privacy of some, & not others, erodes.

EP

It’s true.

(1) YouTube helped keep George Allen out of office.
(2) When Michael Richards exposed his inner racist, cell phone video was there.

&, (3) more recently, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports wonders what might have happened to high school basketball phenom OJ Mayo’s rep had hand held & cell phone cams not recorded his (non-) confrontation with a high school ref.

Specifically, Wojnarowski writes

Once, the wire story would’ve shaped the public’s perception of that strange high school scene in West Virginia. America’s best high school basketball player would’ve been framed as something of a punk, what with him getting ejected for trash talking, chasing down an official and knocking him on his fanny and all.

The highest and mightiest would’ve wagged those fingers with a “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” toward a system that creates these holy teenage terrors, and O.J. Mayo’s reputation would’ve been shot to hell.

Only, the truth didn’t come out through the West Virginia Secondary School’s Activities Commission’s spin, or game referee Mike Lazo’s dubious reporting of events. Through the footage of hand-held cameras and video phones uploaded onto the Internet since Friday’s game between Huntington and Capital high schools in Charleston, this turns out to be a different day of truth-telling in sports.

This time, the kid isn’t so easily boxed up and stereotyped.

This time, the grownups had to be accountable for behavior, too.

Wojnarowski spin on “what-could-have-been” sounds pretty believable to me. Mainstream sports coverage does a god-awful job keeping sane & speaking sanely about African-American basketball players. (I’m not going to rehash this here; see Sports Media Review’s excellent blog for a discussion of media coverage of African-American basketball players.)

& Wojnarowski is probably correct : thanks to those handheld cams, as well as to the ease with which those videos can be uploaded & shared, OJ Mayo’s rep hasn’t suffered much in light of this incident. &, given the content of the video, that seems fair.

But is this it? A better democracy because we’re watched better?

If it was, perhaps we could take those lovable YouTube guys to their favorite bars, purchase them a drink, & thank them. Mission accomplished, you know?

But consider that Slate.com’s Michael Agger calls camera phones “the gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on.”

(Somewhere in the recesses of his Orwellian paranoia, Agger hears Foucault whispering that Panopticon is the gadget that the curious, the child, the philosopher, and the pervert can all agree on.)

Then there’s Willam G. Staples lamenting in Everyday Surveillance

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)

After hitting you with all this, I have nothing to conclude with. No thesis, no theory, no “best-fit” rhetoric to navigate the complexity or, as Staples suggests, contradictions of democracy and surveillance : We value privacy; privacy protects racism, sexism, & homophobia.

But here are some inConclusions anyway … more hunch & gossip than theory

(1) There’s something a little disturbing about “the masses” turning surveillance back onto ourselves.
(2) Increased surveillance of authority is as likely to produce more nefarious & cynical strategies of p.r. than it is to effectively keep the bad-ass behaviors of the powers that be in line.
(3) Surveillance might normalize public behavior; think Michael Richards & his brethren consistently not calling for the lynching of black people. It might even normalize private behavior; think Folely & his cronies consistently not using instant messaging programs for deviant purposes. But there’s little that cell phone cams & YouTube can do about the distribution of wealth, health care, minimum wage, etc. You know, those structural issues. Yes, the personal is political, but it’s not that political.

EP