2. Surveillance: What is It?
What might its geographies be?
• Split into groups of 2
• Spend 10 minutes coming up with a definition of
surveillance and brainstorming all the areas and activities
in your life that you think are subject to some form of
mediated or computerised surveillance
• For each, note down the geographical dimensions of the
surveillance process. Where, for example, are the
surveillers and the surveilled? How are they related?
3. The Ambivalence of Surveillance
• A definition: The monitoring of social behaviour over
various distances in attempts to minimize risks or
attempt social control
• All social relationships necessarily involve surveillance.
Often very positive effects…
• Paradox: city life, long attractive for its anonymity and
the potential to escape often suffocating surveillance
and social control in rural communities, increasingly
saturated by tracking, monitoring, remembering,
devices
4. Foucault’s Disciplinary Societies
• Michel Foucault (top) Discipline and Punish.
Social control in modern, disciplinary societies,
rests of extended array of enclosed, disciplinary,
spaces: clinics, prisons, schools, factories,
workhouses, barracks…
• Panopticon design principles (after English
philosopher/reformer, Jeremy Bentham
1748-1832, bottom)
• The power of visibility and the gaze
• Social control based on the possibilities of being
constantly monitored, even if controller not
actually present
• Social control and docility become internalised
within subjects so heavy-handed authoritarian
power is not needed
6. Deleuze (1925-1995): Postscript
on Societies of Control (1988)
• Shift away from physical, panoptic,
design, to embedded, technological
sensors, spread through, and
constituting, society
• Continuous, interconnecting, machinic,
desocialised, and increasingly automated
surveillance operating simultaneously
over many scales: body to globe
• “In the disciplinary societies one was
always starting again (from school to the
barracks, from the barracks to the
factory), while in societies of control one
is never finished with anything”
7. From Modern Bureaucracies to the Data Image
• Closely related to remediations and shifts
to ubiquitous computing: “sentient
environments”
• Globalization, automation, shift to
biometric systems
• Underpins new consumption, distribution
and production practices: saturates
popular culture and imaginative practices
• Behaviours, tastes, movements,
continuously project and refine one’s
‘data image’
• Simulations and social profiles
incraesingly shaped through surveillance
of actual behaviour
8. Case Study 1: Street CCTV
• 3 million cameras in UK
• Average Londoner viewed 300 times per day!
• Linked to privatization and enclosure of public
space and normalisation of shopping-mall style
controls: “malls without walls”
• Moral panics e.g. Jamie Bulger murder, Liverpool
• Geographical diffusion towards near ubiquity
• “Surveillance creep” as extra functions added
• Militarisation of law enforcement: ‘Homeland
Security’
10. “Normative Space-Time Ecologies”
Norris and Armstrong
• Ethnographic analysis of control rooms
Norris and Armstrong’s book The
Maximum Surveillance Society
• Categorical judgment based on notions
of ‘normality’
• Visual stereotypes used to define
‘abnormal’ people and behaviours and
so mobilise law enforcement or exclusion
• Black men, in certain dress, and groups
of teenagers, main ‘targets’; women
largely ignored except as targets for
voyeuristic, sexualised, gaze
11. Towards Facial Recognition or
“Algorithmic” CCTV
• Trials in Newham, East London, late 1990s; US
Superbowl, airport security
• Also “gait recognition” (walking style)
• Huge investment and R and D but still very ineffective
on city streets
• ”Unlike other biometrics [it] can operate
anonymously in the background" (Koskela, 2003).
• In future, may allow CCTV to extend to be a ‘5th
Utility’?
• Potentially a social and spatial tracking system
monitoring named individuals and silently and
continuously alerting security personnel of presence
of know on potential offenders
12. The Racial and Social
Politics of Facial
Recognition
• Various trials of facial recognition CCTV
• Introna 2003 "for the top systems identification rates for males were
6% to 9% points higher than for females. Recognition rates for older
people were higher than for younger people" (2003, 20).
• Quotes the official report evaluating a trial which confirms that "Asians
are easier [to recognise] than whites, African-Americans are easier
than whites, [and] other race members are easier than whites" (FRVT,
2002)
• See Graham’s “Software-sorted geographies”, PIHG, 2005.
13. 2. “Smart Borders”:
Passports and National ID Cards
• Shift to digital and biometric
passports and migration control
• Possible even RFIDs: “ubiquitous
borders”
• Global tracking systems
• Easier to identify and exclude
‘illegal’ migrants as they will not
have parallel, biometric identifier
moving with their bodies through
the system
• Uses agency of code to further
separate acceptable/celebrated
and demonised mobilities
14. 3. Software-Sorted Services and Neoliberal Restructuring
• New surveillance capabilities used to differentiated consumers,
“unbundle” services, reduce risks and improve profitability from point
of view of service suppliers
• Everything from road space, train fares, internet packets, to call centre
waiting times prioritised and treated differentially through surveillance
• Underpins a “splintering urbanism”(Graham and Marvin, 2001)
15. Call Centre Queuing: The
Politics of Invisible
Bypass
• E.g. “Automatic queue
prioritization. This allows
[service providers] to identify
“high value” members. Calls
from such members are
automatically are bumped to
the front of the phone queue
so they’re answered
immediately.”
16. The Post 9/11 “Surveillance Surge”
• Ubiquitous anti-terror discourse
undermines criticism and
democratic debate: ‘chilling
effect’
• Surveillance ‘creep’ as antiterrorism rationale added to
others eg London Road Pricing
• ‘Security’ mantra overwhelms
civil, social and urban policy
domains
• Huge supply-push, as military
industrial companies colonise
civil markets with military
technologies
17. Surveillance, Voyeurism, Exhibitionism
• Surveillance increasingly celebrated,
even fetishised, within popular culture
• Deepening connection between CCTV
capture, ordinary TV camera feeds, and
broadcast TV/multimedia
• Proliferation of digital video cameras
and web cams
• Surveillance blurs with simulation
• Reality TV, crime and police chase
shows, also dystopian movies like The
Matrix and The Truman Show
• Surveillance intrinsic to deepening
celebrity culture and ‘society of
spectacle’ (Guy Debord)
18. 4. Jordan Crandall: Tracking,
Militarization and ‘Armed Vision”
• “While civilian images are embedded in processes
of identification based on reflection, militarised
perspectives collapse identification processes into
“Id-ing” - a one-way channel of identification in
which a conduit, a database, and a body are
aligned and calibrated” (Crandall 1999)
• “tracking is integral” to the emerging modes of
governance and sovereign and military power
based on anticipatory seeing. ” (Crandall 1999)
• this widespread integration of computerised
tracking with databases of ‘targets’ represent
little but of “a gradual colonization of the now, a
now always slightly ahead of itself” (Crandall
1999).
19. Jordan Crandall stresses:
• Automated linkages of databases to sensors
and tracking systems (airports, e-commerce,
borders, GPS, road charging, oyster cards,
algorithmic surveillance etc.)
• Way these provide anticipatory forms of
surveillance based on risk-profiling of people
as ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ and automatic,
military-style identification and tracking of the
latter
• Ways in which these form a system of what
he calls ‘armed vision’
20. Conclusion: The Surveillant Assemblage
(Kevin Haggerty)
• Remediations of social control: Increasing interconnection,
normalisation, automation, distanciation, globalisation, simulation
• Closely related to application of neoliberal models of service and
spatial restructuring: ‘premium’ services for targeted groups and
increasingly problematic access for those deemed unprofitable or
risky who are demonised, criminalised, or electronically pushed away
• Might spaces without surveillance may become sources of fear? E.g.
CCTV ‘5th utility’ idea
• Digitisation of societal and social memory. Shift away from a politics
or possibility of forgetting?
• The ‘calculative background’ (Thrift) and politics of code
increasingly shape social control, prioritisation, judgment, and
geographies of power. But such code is hidden and very hard to
excavate/research.
21. • But, not a simple shift to an all-seeing, ‘panoptic’ society! Multitude of
overlapping and intersecting ‘Little Brothers’ rather than a single,
panoptic, all-seeing Big Brother.
• Not simple, authoritarian, centralisation. Often, extended surveillance
is embraced, encouraged, constructed by subjects.
• Multiple circuits, sites and geographies at play. Basis for service
customisation, identity-self formation, popular culture etc.
• As Koskella (2003) suggests, "urban space will always remain less
knowable and, thus, less controllable than the restricted panoptic
space".
• Spaces which escape surveillance do and will remain. Amin and Thrift
(2002, 128): ”the networks of control that snake their way through
cities are necessarily oligoptic, not panoptic: they do not fit together.
They will produce various spaces and times, but they cannot fill out the
whole space of the city".
• A politics of transgressing, resisting, and even dismantling inequitable
surveillance is possible
