Surveillance, Access, and Bodies
1. Drawing on danah boyd, Albrechtslund argues that “[e]ven though people obviously communicate online with a specific audience in mind, e.g. their friends, the public nature of online social networking makes the information available to a much larger audience, potentially everyone with access to the Internet” (5). With the inundation of my inbox with spam, the text I just received from some sort of weird Romney-bot (ask me tomorrow, I’ll show you!), and various other non-person entities to which my information is apparently available, I am wondering if the idea of horizontal/participatory surveillance really “maps.” That is, are the ads on your Facebook page, the ads on the side of your Gmail, and spam examples of the potential verticalization of social networks and social networking?
2. Heads up, this is a question I’ll probably bring up in class. What is the relationship between surveillance and space? More specifically, what meanings are read into a space when it is the object of surveillance? How are issues of safety, danger, value, and other meanings mapped onto a space when we recognize it as surveilled?
3. Finally, a really general question that will always bother me: Who is being watched? Who isn’t? Or, whose bodies are deemed more necessary to watch than others? This was a major contention I had with the Albrechtslund piece, and I found part of the answer in Butler’s discussion of the ways in which Rodney King’s body was seen and interpreted as always already dangerous. Still, I wonder if there are any people (or even place) that are not surveilled. My mind immediately went to high-powered, heavily guarded government figures, but as Watergate and the recent obsession with the incredibly photogenic First Family demonstrate, they too are heavily watched and scrutinized. So, back to the original question, who is/n’t being watched? This, I argue, is necessarily attached to another question, becoming “who is/n’t being watched and for what purpose?” So, why are some things news and others aren’t, why are some faces, stories, names, etc. familiar and others are covered up or brushed aside?
Definitions
Body: The physical/corporeal form which, in a complex process of internal and external discipline, is shaped to interact with that which is outside of it in a temporally, culturally, and socially specific manner.
Place: A space whose specificity is connected not only to the bodies that occupy it, but also the ideas that are mapped onto it.