When I met up with my group to brainstorm for PB4, we started discussing surveillance and how it is so engrained in media technologies. This is a topic of endless interest for me. Some points of interest are how different countries use surveillance, and comparing Australia to other countries. You can think local and consider the data retention laws that were past last year, and what that means for the everyday citizen. You can consider hacking, leaking and what that has revealed about government surveillance. As well as this there is the corporations gathering data for to sell more products… and so forth. Humphreys (2013) wrote an article called Who’s Watching Whom? A Study of Interactive Technology and Surveillance. 

In it he lists four kinds of surveillance via media technologies.

• The first and most obvious is the surveillance of a corporation (for example) over an unsuspecting citizen, gaining information about them that can be used to influence those being surveyed and/or others.
• Voluntary panopticon: People willingly participate in being monitored because they believe it is of some benefit to them.
• Lateral surveillance is citizens watching each other. with the development of the internet and the abundance of highly personal social media sights, people can search and monitor each other.
• Self surveillance: this involves the recording of one’s self to play at another time. Humpreys (2013) argues that self recording changes the nature of how you perceive yourself, recording, videoing and photographing ones self may change the way they think about themselves or may influence the way they behave.

The last type of surveillance is an incredibly interesting point. Some thoughts that come to mind are: the massive amount of video, photo information that we record and put on the internet. Once recorded and online, it may be used in ways we did not intend. Another thought on the last point is on Snap Chat and that sort of thing, not only is it self surveillance, as described by Humphreys (2013) but also others interact with your uploaded video, hence changing the way you may have thought about it originally. (Just some disjointed thoughts. More on this to come).

You can find the article here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/doi/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01570.x/epdf

References:

Humphreys, L 2013 ‘Who’s watching whom? A study of interactive technology and surveillance,’ Journal of Communication, vol. 61, pp. 575-595.