Surveillance history and the history of new media: An evidential paradigm

Abstract

New media are often addressed within the growing field of surveillance studies, but technologies predating the late twentieth century are rarely considered. This essay challenges conventional histories of modern surveillance by highlighting the cultural impact of three ‘old’ new media: photography, the phonograph, and the telephone. Drawing upon the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg (1990) , I argue that new media produce new evidence and that late nineteenth-century media contributed to an emergent ‘evidential paradigm’. From this perspective, the intensification of contemporary surveillance can be seen as an elaboration of late nineteenth-century new media and the proliferation of evidence-producing communication technologies.

Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites

“…Indeed, Carne states that "In principle, a single wideband connection like an optical fibre could link the system with the world" (Carne 1979: 65). There are also older examples, where one might consider the phonograph -like YouTube, users preferred to listen to recordings rather than make their own (Edison 1878) and the telephone -which according to the New York Times in 1877 threatened to expose sewing circle gossip, secret society affairs and the sweet cooings of private courtships (Lauer 2012). Doesn't this all resonate with elements of SNSs as we know them today?…”

“…The SST approach has been shown to be useful in making sense a wide range of artefacts. Previous studies for instance have examined refrigerators, missile guidance systems, electric lighting, the bicycle, the telephone and videotext, radio, telephony, and electric media and computing and organisational technologies (see (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, Bijker 1987, Bijker and Law 1994, Bijker 1995, Abbate 1999, Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999, Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005, Pinch 2005, Light and Wagner 2006, Boczkowski and Lievrouw 2008, Howcroft and Light 2010, Lauer 2012). It has been suggested that historians and sociologists of technology have focused on technology as their major topic of analysis, whereas those who do cultural and media studies have primarily attended to users and consumers Pinch 2005, Flanagin et al 2010).…”

Cosmopolitanism and the Media

“…As Lauer (2011) suggests, social encounters are information-rich events. We would add that such encounters cannot be captured by relatively uncomplicated concepts such as lateral surveillance, empowering exhibitionism or interactive surveillance.…”

The Role of Hackers in Countering Surveillance and Promoting Democracy

“…One can therefore conclude that surveillance as such is a big data endeavor (see Andrejevic & Gates, 2014;Tufekci, 2014). While the intimate relationship between technologies and surveillance goes at least back to evidence-producing tools like photography and telephone (Lauer, 2011), the pervasive embeddedness of media technologies and infrastructures in almost any spectrum of human life has introduced both a qualitative and quantitative difference. This observation echoes the principle that Shoshana Zuboff has convincingly outlined in her seminal writing on the Age of the Smart Machine: Everything that can be automated will be automated; everything that can be informated will be informated; every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control (Zuboff, 1988).…”