Surveillance, Technology and Paranoia

Following on from the film I watched last week, it has led me into new directions and lines of enquiry in relation to my project.

I have been reading Kelli Feury's book New Media: Culture and Image, some of the passages seemed particularly pertinent in relation to the topic I want to cover:

'The many ways we interact with new media technologies are acts of surveillance: we watch the consequences of our interactions with new media, waiting for the outcomes, the immediate feedbacks - and these are acts that are partly (if not entirely) based on visual confirmation of what we have done.'



This position is an apposite framework for how facebook and other social networking sites.

Also I found it interesting with new technologies in relation to new anxieties arising out of using such technologies:

'For freud, this internal anxiety is imagined, whereas external anxiety is, more often than not, real.  Paranoia is produced through the mechanisms of projection, whereby subject place their worry onto an object that presents no threat'

And specifically in relation to how technology has become so ingrained into our culture, our own private lives, in which we are never far from the public eye through such things as Facebook that anxiety is generated from this constant fear of being watched and documented:

'If our axieties stem from acts of projection, from an inability to clearly and readily assess knowledge as answers - Are we being watched? When? By whom?- can we say that new media has produced a culture of subjection? Have all these new technologies (internet, mobile phones and so on), that have become such an integral part of our daily habits in terms of communication, working life, and socializing , created the intrusion of regulation? ... The more our lives and memories become translated into data, the longer the power remains unnoticed, and the more ingrained its government becomes.'

She talks of nano-technologies and 'roborats' - unnable to control their own movements, being dictated by an other.

Maybe exploring how technologies have become so in-grained in our culture, that we forget them, but at the same time, we are become ever more governed. Both through external regulation (the fear that we are being watched all the time by technology) and self-regulation.

More to follow...