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Surveillance, from the French verb, surveiller, means ”watching over.” It involves the observation of behaviors, actions and activities to collect data and personal information on the part of governments, law enforcement agencies, and others such as credit and banking institutions, corporations, and research companies.
Surveillance functions as social control. Michel Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon is a metaphor for surveillance society and accompanying disciplinary apparatuses. State power is no longer exercised through torture; rather, it is hidden in the everyday corpus of technologies to make populations self-police their own behavior. For example, why drive within the speed limit? Because someone (or some camera) may be watching.
Today, new information technologies have multiplied ways of conducting surveillance: monitoring Internet usage and connections on social networking sites, phones and text messaging, traffic and street cameras, fingerprinting, medical and educational records, credit card records, satellite imagery, GPS tracking and RFID chips, government issued ID cards and census-taking, and so on.
Reasons for increased surveillance have also multiplied: direct advertising, employee productivity, insurance premiums, credit history, intelligence to combat the ”war on terror” (Lyon 2003), voting districts and welfare policies, among many others. In this way, surveillance underscores the characteristics of modernity: rationality, record keeping, bureaucracy, systemization, and efficiency.
The increase of new surveillance technologies prompts the term ”surveillance society” and the expansion to large-scale populations brings about the term ”mass surveillance.” Such heightening of surveillance raises concerns about whether these new technologies keep people safe or whether they are intrusive and violate personal privacy.
Everyone who pays with a credit card and who uses a cell phone participates in the processes that make possible widespread surveillance. It is not a top down process: from neighborhood watch programs to looking out for suspicious persons at the airport, surveillance is part of the social fabric pushed forward by new technologies, routines, conveniences, and concerns for safety.
Bibliography:
- Foucault, M. (1995) [1978] Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. Vintage Books, New York.
- Lyon, D. (2003) Surveillance after September 11. Polity Press, Cambridge.
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