‘Outlines of a World Coming into Existence’: Pervasive Computing and the Ethics of Forgetting

Abstract

In this paper we examine the potential of pervasive computing to create widespread sousveillance, that will complement surveillance, through the development of lifelogs; socio-spatial archives that document every action, every event, every conversation, and every material expression of an individual's life. Reflecting on emerging technologies, life-log projects and artistic critiques of sousveillance we explore the potential social, political and ethical implications of machines that never forget. We suggest, given that life-logs have the potential to convert exterior generated oligopticons to an interior panopticon, that an ethics of forgetting needs to be developed and built into the development of life-logging technologies. Rather than seeing forgetting as a weakness or a fallibility we argue that it is an emancipatory process that will free pervasive computing from burdensome and pernicious disciplinary effects.

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

“…Big data and data control centres, such as the Centro De Operacoes Prefeitura Do Rio, that integrate and bind data streams together, work to move the various oligopticon systems into a single, panoptic vantage point and raise the spectre of a Big Brother society based on a combination of surveillance (gazing at the world) and dataveillance (trawling through and interconnecting datasets), and a world in which all aspects of a citizen's life are captured and potentially never forgotten (Dodge and Kitchin 2007b). There is an inherent tension then in the creation of systems that seek to enable more effective modes of governance which also threaten to stifle rights to privacy, confidentiality, and freedom of expression.…”

LifeLogging: Personal Big Data

“…In choosing an appropriate definition, we refer to the description of lifelogging by Dodge and Kitchin (2007), where lifelogging is referred to as"a form of pervasive computing, consisting of a unified digital record of the totality of an individual's experiences, captured multi-modally through digital sensors and stored permanently as a personal multimedia archive". The unified digital record uses multi-modally captured data which has been gathered, stored, and processed into semantically meaningful and retrievable information and has been made accessible through an interface, which can potentially support a wide variety of use-cases, as we will describe later.…”

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

“…The empirical basis of this paper is a set of interviews conducted during Social scientists' investigations of ubicomp have been few but notable (see : Andrejevic, 2005;Crang and Graham, 2007;Dodge and Kitchin, 2007;Galloway, 2004). The vernacular is, however, familiar; ubicomp shares a vocabulary with popular, technologically concerned, future orientations.…”