CCT 205: Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation

Lecture 7: Technology and Surveillance

Administrivia

• A&R questions to come shortly - obviously, deadline not today anymore (next week…)

Surveillance and modernity

• Nation-state

• Bureaucracy

• Technique/Technical Logic

• Political Economy

Nation-State

• Surveillance rises hand in hand with state control - e.g., military/police control

• Extreme cases in totalitarian states, real or fictional (e.g., 1984)

Bureaucracy

• Logic of bureaucratic control expands

• Weber’s “iron cage” - in attempt to control everything, everything is monitored and calculated - to illogical or immoral ends

• Extreme real/fictional examples - but also lesser examples (e.g., taxation and health care, and “undocumented” workers)

Technical Logic

• Ellul - technology more as technique - mechanized control creates the conditions it requires in social/civil world

• Technical requirements create “self-completing system” of technical logic - examples?

Political Economy

• Conflicting interests of power - esp. with respect to corporate power and maintenance of class interest

• Managerial control and determination of technology (and resistance)

• Gandy’s Panoptic Sort - classification of individuals as consumers with given demographic commonalities

• Others?

Superpanopticon

• Bentham’s Panopticon prison - central tower design of potential (but invisible) constant monitoring

• Poster and databases - data represents us, we become the objects of data system, and we then feed the system by our actions - while not owning the data ourselves

• Creates a superpanoptic effect - we create the cage we’re trapped in - examples?

Hypersurveillance

• Hyper in sense of surreal, not more• Baudrillard’s hyperreality - a society of

images and symbols intentionally detached from reality (e.g., “war games”, real or fictional)

• Not new - but IT being about the manipulation of digital artefacts makes it all the easier and faster

• Examples?

Surveillance in Organizations (Zuboff)

• Nation-state - organizational command of information for national interests (e.g., current concern over passports)

• Bureaucracy - IT can streamline and further centralize organizational power and broaden control in real time - e.g., “dashboards” for information monitoring, tying into Blackberrys for 24/7 surveillance

Organizations (2)

• Technique - IT at all levels - e.g., some KM folk who insist anything that can be digitized must be - to what effect?

• Political economy - usually those making these decisions are in positions of power, and decisions done to sustain or maximiize power and control

Implications on Organization

• Database “takes on a life of its own” -grassroots intelligence marginalized, actions taken on trends vs. actual data

• Expertise concentrates - even former white-collar jobs involve “acting-on” vs. “acting with” (and thus subsequently downsized…)

• But - eventually consumes itself (e.g., failures of US intelligence pre 9/11 - lots of technology, very little sense of what was going on…)

Revenge of simulacra

• Simulation and hyperreality - we might be monitoring things that aren’t really there

• Data integration and sense-making - having information is one thing, making sense of it is another (and underfunded)

• Identity confusion - phishing, pharming, identity theft, other manipulations of data?

“Returning the body”

• Personhood important - hypersurveillance and globalization aside, we need food, shelter, communication, love, and other mundane things technology still imitates badly

• Limitations on omnipresence and perfect control - we might not be good at playing God

• Politics and surveillance as joint concern - commitment to sniffing out abuses of surveillance and awareness of its limitations and benefits

• Zuboff and organizational learning - information as collective good

Learning Journal #4

• Have you experienced a situation where external information about you has directly influenced your interaction with society? To what effect? How did you deal with this?

Next Week

• Matt Gorbet next week (should be fun!)

• Labs tonight - introduction of flash learning object assignment