The Culture of Surveillance

Watching as a Way of Life

David Lyon

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509515455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But surveillance is not only 'done to us' – it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing we have nothing to hide. Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data. At the same time, we participate in surveillance in order to supervise children, monitor other road users, and safeguard our property. Social media allow us to keep tabs on others, as well as on ourselves. This is the culture of surveillance. This important book explores the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Its main focus is not high-tech, organized surveillance operations but our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance that range from the casual and careless to the focused and intentional. It insists that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance — from 'The Circle' or 'Black Mirror.' Surveillance culture, David Lyon argues, is not detached from the surveillance state, society and economy. It is informed by them. He reveals how the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalize surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

Part I
Culture in Context

1
Crucibles of Culture

Today’s emerging surveillance culture takes place in a process of social-technological ‘melting’ which, as it intensifies, is creating something new. Hence, ‘crucibles of culture’. The liquefying metaphor speaks of changing relationships, both interpersonal and political,¹ and the contents of the crucibles themselves, of a novel mixing of elements – the technosocial – that portend some unprecedented outcomes. It has become possible to do and say things, using technology, that would have been unthinkable only a generation ago.

For instance, as a Pew study shows, ‘Not only can internet searchers type in queries about someone who has aroused their curiosity, they also can seek pictures, videos, and real-time status updates online.’ Here is do-it-yourself surveillance. The researchers go on, ‘Location-based awareness in mobile devices adds another layer of information that can be searched.’ But immediately, they also expose the other face of the coin: ‘Avid users of mobile devices may voluntarily reveal their identity and location to certain websites, thereby allowing almost anyone to learn their whereabouts.’² Ordinary users watching others, surveillantly, and also providing the data for such surveillance.

This quote propels us directly into surveillance culture territory. It speaks of everyday roles in relation to surveillance. It is mistaken to see surveillance today simply as something that is ‘done to us’; surveillance is experienced and also initiated by ordinary users. Many people do surveillance themselves, sometimes relying on complex technology to do so. The Pew report also points out that facial recognition technology is now commonplace in social media platforms, permitting some to engage in online identification of strangers. Non-visual identification is also easier for everyone, not just for corporations or police. Indeed, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 87 per cent of Americans could be identified with just three bits of information: gender, zip – or postal – code and date of birth.³

Once thought of mainly as the world of private investigators, police and security agencies, the means of surveillance now also flow freely through many media into the hands of the general public. This has helped to create an emerging surveillance culture – the everyday webs of social relations, including shared assumptions and behaviours, existing among all actors and agencies associated with surveillance. The symbolic and the material work together here, creating what is quickly becoming a significant dimension of social life. The culture of surveillance is about how surveillance is enabled not only by technical and political means but also by the enthusiasm, ignorance, and sometimes reluctant cooperation and even initiative-taking of the surveilled.

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework for considering the culture of surveillance. To grasp what is happening in the surveillance world today means extending our understanding of surveillance beyond common phrases such as ‘state surveillance’ or ‘surveillance society’ to think about the mundane ways in which surveillance has become an aspect of everyday lives. To achieve this, the concepts of ‘surveillance imaginaries’ and ‘surveillance practices’ are introduced, elaborated and placed in the context of a world of increasingly ‘liquid surveillance’.

It is not just that daily lives are recorded, monitored and tracked in unprecedented ways, though this rings true. It is that in a culture of surveillance, everyday life routines themselves have an enlarged role in constituting surveillance, particularly through so-called interactivity, that is, through user-generated surveillance. Surveillance has become part of a way of seeing and of being in the world. It is a dimension of a whole way of life.

Today, surveillance is frequently fluid and flexible, in contrast to previous solid and fixed forms, and this resonates with the more liquid modernities of the present. Surveillance works at a distance in both space and time, channelling flows of data and sorting people socially. However, surveillance operates increasingly in consensual ways, dependent on how people perceive and act in relation to surveillance. These surveillance ‘imaginaries’ and ‘practices’ constitute each other; imaginaries provide the sense of what living with surveillance entails, while the practices enable actual initiation, compliance, negotiation or resistance to occur.

Once perceived as a peripheral aspect of life, limited to recognizable suspects or persons-of-interest, surveillance has become central to social experience, both as a serious security issue and as a playful part of mediated relationships. In the mid-twentieth century, many thought of government monitoring as ‘state surveillance’ of an Orwellian kind. In the later twentieth century, the language of ‘surveillance society’ was popularized, referring to a general social experience of cameras in public space capturing street scenes, or loyalty cards tracking spending habits and creating customer profiles.

Here, these concepts are rethought in the light of how surveillance becomes a way of life, a way of ‘seeing’ and ‘being in’ the world. Surveillance still happens in government, policing, intelligence and commerce and is hard-wired into streets and buildings, wirelessly present in smartphones and via internet platforms. It has also been democratized for mass participation through social media. Surveillance cultures emerge more obviously than ever as surveillance becomes more flexible and fluid, touching more frequently the routines of everyday life. Liquid surveillance seeps and streams everywhere.

In what follows, the characteristics of surveillance culture are pulled into focus. But this process is itself dynamic and constantly changing. Some conceptual clues are offered in this chapter, but these ways of seeing are themselves affected by the phenomenon that confronts us. Starting with the notion of cultural ‘liquidity’ is a way of warning that the solidity and stasis of some previous perspectives on social and cultural life are not what they were. I then explain the concepts of imaginaries and practices, each of which suggests movement and mutation.

Liquidity and surveillance culture

Liquid surveillance connects surveillance with major movements within modernity. For Bauman, who popularized the notion of modern ‘liquidity’, all social forms seem subject to melting and surveillance is no exception.⁴ From once being more solid and fixed, surveillance is now increasingly fluid, which in turn contributes to the liquefying of everything from national borders to identities. The former were once thought to be imaginary but locatable geographical lines at the edges of national territories but, as we shall see, they are now as much in data processes remote from ‘actual’ borders.⁵

Equally, identities today are more fluid than fixed, especially in the fast-moving world of social media.⁶ As I have noted, surveillance works in both space and time to channel the flows and thus to enable social sorting. One major result, elaborated by Bauman, is that power is globalized and harder to pin down, while politics seems to be primarily local and limited.

‘Liquid surveillance’ is less a complete way of specifying surveillance and more an orientation, a way of situating surveillance developments in the fluid and unsettling modernity of today. Surveillance softens especially in the consumer realm, as contrasted with policing and national security surveillance. Old moorings are loosened as bits of personal data extracted for one purpose are more easily deployed for another. Would all men guess when buying flowers or chocolates that eXelate, a data broker, sells this information to others as ‘men in trouble’, presumed to have relationship problems?⁷ Surveillance spreads in a fashion hitherto unimaginable to non-experts in marketing, thus responding to and reproducing liquidity.

Without a fixed container, but jolted by security demands and tipped by technology companies’ insistent marketing, surveillance spills out all over, just because it is an organizing p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Surveillance Culture Takes Shape
• Part I: Culture in Context
• Part II: Cultural Currents
• Part III: Co-creation: Culture, Ethics, Politics
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement