Technology and Social Control
Sunday, August 9, 2009 by Anonymous
Dennis (2008) in his article touches on Foucault’s idea of the social ‘panopticon” and how there has been an increased emphasis on tracking, identification and surveillance of the civil sphere in contemporary times. 9/11 has without doubt been a ‘new pearl harbour’. Measures like the Patriot Act in the U.S. allow increased surveillance powers over ‘personal’ computers (now an oxymoron) and telephone records, whilst CCTV saturation in the U.K. has become the perennial ‘big brother.’ These both reflect what Dennis calls the “post millennium state of insecurity” –the key transition this has entailed has been in the form of social control; from physical and overt to technological and coercive (hegemonic).
CCTV is worthy of further analysis because it not only is legitimized as a necessary Orwell-esque agent against the terrorist threat (strengthened by its capturing of the ‘London bombers’ in various locations prior to their suicide attacks) but against crime. However, if CCTV was a technology really designed to prevent crime wholesale it would be placed in lower class areas as well as city centres, air ports, banks and major retail areas - and this isn’t the case. A more realistic interpretation of CCTV would see it as a surveillance technology strategically placed to protect the middle and upper classes by creating self-surveillance in locales of hyper-consumption. Taggers, skaters, prostitutes and other ‘othered’ identities are pushed out because they defy the logic of consumptive space; their actions have no exchange value in the formal economy. Whilst this may protect bourgeoisie havens of property and consumption, the criminal sectors of these ‘othered’ identities don’t disappear but merely migrate to lower class areas without CCTV, further polarizing class gaps on geographical lines and delaying realization of social justice. CCTV, like the prison, is a punitive not a structural solution.
Other dystopian developments in the not so distant future include embedded microchips in the U.S. (like CCTV and the Patriot Act, there is always a seemingly ‘greater good’ justification, in this case to prevent child kidnappings). Despite the microchip being closer to the idea of the perennial ‘cyborg’, because CCTV is an external not an internal, biologically embedded technology, both roads lead to Rome eventually – a society that controls and tracks behaviour through an increasingly inseparable convergence between human and machine. Finally, I believe that the endless recycling of cyborg themes and tropes in popular culture, from RoboCop to Terminator 3, has conflated techno-bodies with fiction and mindless entertainment to such a degree that real-world “psycho-civilized” threats such as those outlined by Dennis (2008) can penetrate deeper and deeper into society without us questioning them and realizing they are now firmly in the domain of reality not at the movies or on your Xbox.
CCTV is worthy of further analysis because it not only is legitimized as a necessary Orwell-esque agent against the terrorist threat (strengthened by its capturing of the ‘London bombers’ in various locations prior to their suicide attacks) but against crime. However, if CCTV was a technology really designed to prevent crime wholesale it would be placed in lower class areas as well as city centres, air ports, banks and major retail areas - and this isn’t the case. A more realistic interpretation of CCTV would see it as a surveillance technology strategically placed to protect the middle and upper classes by creating self-surveillance in locales of hyper-consumption. Taggers, skaters, prostitutes and other ‘othered’ identities are pushed out because they defy the logic of consumptive space; their actions have no exchange value in the formal economy. Whilst this may protect bourgeoisie havens of property and consumption, the criminal sectors of these ‘othered’ identities don’t disappear but merely migrate to lower class areas without CCTV, further polarizing class gaps on geographical lines and delaying realization of social justice. CCTV, like the prison, is a punitive not a structural solution.
Other dystopian developments in the not so distant future include embedded microchips in the U.S. (like CCTV and the Patriot Act, there is always a seemingly ‘greater good’ justification, in this case to prevent child kidnappings). Despite the microchip being closer to the idea of the perennial ‘cyborg’, because CCTV is an external not an internal, biologically embedded technology, both roads lead to Rome eventually – a society that controls and tracks behaviour through an increasingly inseparable convergence between human and machine. Finally, I believe that the endless recycling of cyborg themes and tropes in popular culture, from RoboCop to Terminator 3, has conflated techno-bodies with fiction and mindless entertainment to such a degree that real-world “psycho-civilized” threats such as those outlined by Dennis (2008) can penetrate deeper and deeper into society without us questioning them and realizing they are now firmly in the domain of reality not at the movies or on your Xbox.
Great post - I'm especially interested in the idea that pop culture cyborgs do more to distract and obscure than to draw our attention to real-world cyborgization.