Dataveillance has been an ordinary technology that is mostly used to trace personal trading records or economic crimes. Lyon compares dataveillance with the ubiquitous surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four and I see a lot of aspects they have in common. Let’s assume a person uses credit card frequently in daily life. He pays the check in a restaurant, buys flowers for his date or refills his car on a vacation elsewhere. Anything he does can be retrieved from the data of time and location in the records. Although the surveillance system provides protection for the customers, “Big Brother” is indeed watching you. After all, the Panopticon is not so different from the ‘Dystopia’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four. They both involve“the theme of exploiting uncertainty as a means of controlling subordinates.” (62) My uncle works in the Department of Internet in China. He told me that within one minute, he could pull out all records of a person in one year, including phone call, bank deal, utility bill, and browsing history. It echoes Lyon’s perspective that ubiquitous electronic surveillance has become true and has profound impact in our daily life.
Beside what we often consider as surveillance like dataveillance which comes down upon us from high-level inspection organizations, media, entertainment industry and social media provides opportunity for everybody to be one of the inspectors, just like the Panopticon. Two weeks ago, a Chinese young actor who has become famous few years ago had an affair. One week after the news, he published a letter of apology on his personal Weibo account in which he said he almost collapsed mentally. The formidable pressure is from the fans and media. People have become the Big Brother who constantly monitor others through the eyes of internet.
The electronic surveillance is not only ubiquitous but also omniscient. While we were exploring Google’s Ngram Viewer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Google advertisement. The Cloud Data technology enables Google to put on the commercials that most interest me. They make decision based on all activities bound to my Google account. Recently, the most popular Chinese mobile social networking app WeChat, operated by Tencent, decided to run commercials to its eleven hundred million users with Cloud Data technology.
WeChat: to know more, click here.
Lyon, David. “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon.” The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994. 57-79. Print.
You introduce an important part of the surveillance ecology here: us. We’re used to thinking about governments watching us, and corporations collecting data on us, but we also should consider the ways in which we watch each other (and display ourselves to each other).Reference