Data Culture

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.

In “From Big Brother to the Electric Panopticon,” David Lyon analyzes two perceptions of surveillance and prompts the question of how such theories relate to the present day. Lyon’s defines George Orwell’s “Dystopia” as the idea of a defined yet veiled form of observation, one where “those under surveillance were unsure whether there was any time they could relax” (60). The “Panopticon,” on the other hand, also involves observation but centers around inspection. Individuals under surveillance become aware of external viewing to the point that they begin to inspect themselves they are “bearers of their own surveillance” (66). Through modern processes of data collection—from license plates to Internet searches—Lyons suggests that we have become increasingly aware of surveillance in our everyday habits. The developed world has reached the point where “Dystopia” and the “Panopticon” have become realities.

     Few, if any, people can prevent surveillance in the twenty-first century; I argue that we accept our residence in an observation-dominant world in exchange for connectivity. The same technologies that blur “distinctions between private and public life” (71) simultaneously bring individual public and private lives together. Facebook, for example, offers “friends” (no matter how close) the opportunity to share photographs and articles, play games, and message. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on the networks his platform creates in his January 1, 2015 update, declaring, “may all our efforts make the world a smaller, warmer, happier, and more connected place this year.” As one interacts to a higher degree with Facebook (and makes his or her world “smaller”), the social media platform’s surveillance increases. Instagram’s ability to offer “suggested” account to follow based on one’s current follow list (in addition to friends I follow National Parks, outdoors photographers, and Boston sports teams—and receive very relevant suggestions) highlights its ability to cater to personal preference, but also its power of surveillance. It’s inevitable that we experience the surveillance theories outlined in Lyon’s article. We now must determine what we’re willing to receive in exchange.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lyon, David. “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon.” The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994. 57-79. Print.

Much like Winston Smith, we are all very aware that we are being surveyed  in one way or another. Every time we use the internet or a credit card, data pertinent to our lives is automatically entered into massive databases under control of both government and private agencies. I even know several people who keep tape over the webcam on their computers, making the comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four and its two-way television even more clear and relevant. However, Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s model of “Big Brother” falls short of modeling the current surveillance of American society.  One such weaknesses of Orwell’s model is its lack of covertness. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, citizens were made well aware of their own surveillance. And while today we are very well aware that the government and other agencies are keeping watch, the day to day ways in which we are surveyed are often not even realized. A subtle Google search may seem insignificant enough, but every search can easily be cataloged into massive databases accessible by the powerful few.  It wasn’t even until Edward Snowden’s leaks that this type of surveillance has become common household knowledge or discussion. Therefore, we could be classified as much more naive than the citizens of Oceania with regards to surveillance.

Dataveillance is a word which captures the spirit of today’s massive surveillance efforts. The term suggests not only a visual surveillance such as Orwell envisioned, but a surveillance of data in general. The thought that massive databases which collect wide varieties of different data types are now being used to characterize and model our lives is quite sobering, and a reality which we’ve already witnessed in this class.

In two weeks of Data Culture, we’ve wrestled with the meaning of “data,” debating whether data are merely fodder for larger arguments or potent enough to make a definitive argument on their own. David Lyon, in his 1994 book The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society, posits that electronic data are too malleable to simply be taken at face value.

Lyon employs the term “dataveillance” to describe the modern methods of surveillance, which take the form of big data and supercomputers, rendering the Big Brother-style video surveillance of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four unnecessary in the modern world. With extensive information on file about the demographics, histories, and consumer preferences of a population, governments and corporations both appear to have the details of the populace at their fingertips—a frightening thought, for sure. But Lyon counters that data’s malleability makes “confidence in the reliability of the record somewhat naïve” (59). For one, data stored by computers can easily be erased without being conspicuous in their absence. As a result, the “electronic trail” of data doesn’t necessarily tell its entire story. With audio and video surveillance, however, broken links are impossible to ignore—consider the missing eighteen minutes of the Watergate tapes. Additionally, Lyon brings up the issue of identity theft; I may not be able to impersonate my grandmother well enough to fool surveillance video, but I could certainly impersonate her while shopping online if given the right data.

The lesson, it seems, is that data can’t be fully trusted: not seeing means not (necessarily) believing. Therefore, it follows that “dataveillance” fails to embody Bentham’s original Panopticon structure, since the central authority has an unclear view of what its “inmates” (i.e. citizens or clientele) are truly up to. Those who fear that big data has ushered Big Brother into our daily lives ought to relax, because numbers only tell part of the story.

Lyon, David. “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon.” The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994. 57-79. Print.