Internet and Society - Social Theory in the Information Age

Google Video, or Facebook, and so on, are self-determined decisions of individuals who aim at making social connections with people who share similar interests and whom they wouldn’t be able to know without this global medium. For most of them, being monitored by others and monitoring others is pleasurable in mental or even sexual respects and experienced as life enhancing. Electronic surveillance by nation-states and corporations aims at controlling the behavior of individuals and groups, that is, they should be forced to behave or not behave in certain ways because they know that their appearance, movements, location, or ideas are or could be watched by electronic systems. In the case of political electronic surveillance, individuals are threatened by the potential exercise of organized violence (of the law) if they behave in certain ways that are undesired but watched by political actors (such as secret services or the police). In the case of economic electronic surveillance, individuals are threatened by the violence of the market, which wants to force them to buy or produce certain commodities and helps reproducing capitalist relations by gathering and using information on their economic behavior with the help of electronic systems. In such forms of surveillance, violence and heteronomy are the ultimo ratio, whereas in private forms of displaying oneself on the Internet violence in most cases does not play an important role. In private surveillance, the individuals being watched agree to it; in economic and political surveillance they don’t and in most cases don’t even know that they are under surveillance. Hence, I would distinguish between electronic monitoring as a general notion of providing and gathering information with the help of electronic systems and electronic surveillance as the gathering of information on individuals or groups in order to control their behavior by threatening the exercise of institutionalized violence or exercising economic violence. I agree with Ogura (2006) that a common characteristic of surveillance is the management of population based on capitalism and/or the nation-state. Haggerty(2006) argues that there are also forms of surveillance of nonhuman entities such as bacteria, space, nature, and so on, but that the metaphor of the panopticon is always directed at humans. These are forms of monitoring and only forms of surveillance if the gathered information is used for coercing humans. The problem with the approach of Haggerty is that he conceives surveillance as a very general phenomenon so that repressive aspects directed against humans can’t be accentuated. The distinction between political surveillance and economic surveillance corresponds to Lyon’s distinction between categorical suspicion and categorical seduction. Ball and Webster (2003, 8) have added (a) categorical care and (b) categorical exposure as two other forms of surveillance by (a) health/welfare services and (b) the media. I suggest seeing these two types as subcategories of (a) political and (b) economic surveillance.

8.4.2. Electronic Surveillance: Foucault and Orwell There are two dominant readings of Foucault’s (1979) work on the panopticon. One argues that contemporary surveillance is a deepening of the panoptic principles; the other says that surveillance today is not only statecentered, but more plural, and hence nonpanoptic. Foucault describes Bentham’s panopticon as a prison architecture where prison cells are organized in a circle so that each inmate can be watched from a central observation point so that a visibility of the individuals is established. He “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault 1979, 208). Surveillance is a power that is “capable of making all visible, as long as it . . . [can] itself remain invisible” (Foucault 1979, 222). Foucault describes how surveillance has become a fundamental mechanism of modern society that is pervasive in all institutions so that less direct violence is needed and people discipline themselves because they are aware of surveillance and afraid of potential sanctions or are disciplined by punishment. Electronic and digital surveillance have helped producing a general state of surveillance in which people’s behavior, ideas, movements, look, and so on, can be permanently watched and assessed at a distance without their awareness. It 204