Surveillance Flashcards
How an surveillance be defined? What does it involve?
=> “The monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control.”
=> Involves observing other people’s behaviour to gather data about it, and typically using the data to regulate, manage or ‘correct’ their behaviour.
What methods are used for surveillance in late modern society?
=> CCTV cameras.
=> Biometric scanning.
=> Automated number plate recognition.
=> Electronic tagging and databases.
How are sources of surveillance used?
=> They collate information from different sources to produce profiles of groups and individuals.
=> Can be used in this way to control crime and disorder.
Describe sovereign power.
=> Typical of the period before the 19th century.
=> Monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies.
=> Control asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body.
=> Punishment was a brutal, emotional spectacle (e.g., public decapitations).
Describe disciplinary power.
=> Became dominant from the 19th century.
=> In the form of social control.
=> Seeks to govern the mind, rather than the body.
=> Does so through surveillance.
Give one view of why brutal bodily punishment disappeared as a form of control.
Western societies became more civilised and humane.
How does Foucalt reject the liberal view that brutal bodily punishment was lost from Western societies because they became more humane and civilised?
He claims that disciplinary power replaced sovereign power because surveillance is more a efficient ‘technology of power’.
What is the panopticon?
=> Used by Foucalt to illustrate disciplinary power.
=> A design for a prison in which each prisoner in their own cell is visible to guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners.
=> Prisoners do not know whether they are being watched or not, but they do know that they could be being watched, resulting in the surveillance turning into self-surveillance, and eventually self-discipline.
How can the principle of the panopticon be seen in modern society?
=> Through the use of CCTV cameras.
=> The UK is one of the most policed countries in terms of the high number of CCTV cameras.
=> Members of society assume they are being watched by CCTV and therefore behave in an orderly manner.
How does disciplinary power compare to sovereign power?
=> Disciplinary power seeks to intensively monitor individuals with a view to rehabilitate them.
=> Sovereign power simply seeks to crush or violently repress offenders.
Describe Foucault’s dispersal of discipline.
=> Argues that the prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to increase conformity through self-surveillance.
=> Other institutions include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.
=> Non-prison based social control practices, such as community service orders allow other institutions and wider society (such as teachers, social workers and psychiatrists) to exercise surveillance over the population.
What is the evaluation supporting Foucault?
Foucalt’s work has stimulated considerable research into surveillance and disciplinary power, especially the idea of the ‘electronic Panopticon’ whereby modern technologies are used to monitor us.
What are the evaluations against Foucault?
=> Has been criticised on several grounds e.g., the shift from sovereign power and corporal punishment to disciplinary power and imprisonment isn’t as clear as suggested.
=> Accused of wrongly assuming that the expressive aspects of punishment disappear in modern society.
=> Exaggerates the extent of control e.g., Goffman shows how some prison/mental hospital inmates are able to resist controls.
=> CCTV cameras are a form of panopticon, however they are not necessarily preventing crime, they just displace it.
=> May be that CCTV falsely reassures the public about their security, even though it makes little difference to their risk of victimisation.
=> Feminists such as Koskela criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’, rendering women more visible to the voyeurism (sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engage in personal behaviours) of the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure.
What is Bauman and Lyon’s (2013) Liquid Surveillance?
=> Surveillance is a basic feature of modern life; a key dimension of the modern world.
=> Modern societies are fluid, and it makes sense to think of them in a ‘liquid’ phase, because citizens, workers and consumers find their movements monitored, traced and tracked.
=> Video cameras in public places, passport control, body scanners, biometric checks, purchase of particular goods, access/participation is social media, ID cards, passwords, coded controls into buildings, google monitoring searches, customised marketing strategies; these are all examples of ways in which peoples activities are tracked everyday.
What does Bauman argue?
=> The world is post-panoptical.
=> Electronic technologies are used to assert power, making the architecture of walls and windows irrelevant.
=> Architecture has been replaced with firewalls.
=> Forms of control display different faces and share features of flexibility and fun seen in entertainment (e.g., airport check-in can be done by smartphone).
