JournalTOCs

Surveillance and Society
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.997

Citation Impact (citeScore): 2
Number of Followers: 7

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1477-7487 - ISSN (Online) 1477-7487
Published by Surveillance and Society

[1 journal]

Security, Suspicion, and Surveillance' There’s an App for That
- Authors: Liam Kennedy, Madelaine Coelho
  Pages: 127 - 141
  Abstract: Despite the recent rise in popularity of mobile safety applications, social scientists have yet to examine these applications in any considerable depth. In this paper we undertake the case studies of bSafe, Citizen, and Nextdoor – analyzing promotional materials and blog posts – in order to further theorize digital security consumption and the potential concomitant social harms. We find these app companies frame crime and risk in ways that obscure the structural elements that precede crime and encourage social divisions. Drawing from over 30,000 user reviews, we speculate about the ways these apps might shape understandings, feelings, and experiences of risk, crime, and victimization. A closer examination of these apps is particularly urgent given these digital technologies have been mobilized in similar ways to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14536
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in
Digital Games
- Authors: Ragnhild Solberg
  Pages: 142 - 156
  Abstract: As the increasingly ubiquitous field of surveillance has transformed how we interact with each other and the world around us, surveillance interactions with virtual others in virtual worlds have gone largely unnoticed. This article examines representations of digital games’ diegetic surveillance cameras and their relation to the player character and player. Building on a dataset of forty-one titles and in-depth analyses of two 2020 digital games that present embodied surveillance camera perspectives, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix 2020) and Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020), I demonstrate that the camera is crucial in how we organize, understand, and maneuver the fictional environment and its inhabitants. These digital games reveal how both surveillance power fantasies and their critique can coexist within a space of play. Moreover, digital games often present a perspective that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the technically mediated through a flattening of the player’s “camera” screen and in-game surveillance cameras. Embodied surveillance cameras in digital games make the camera metaphor explicit as an aesthetic, narrative, and mechanical preoccupation. We think and play with and through cameras, drawing attention to and problematizing the partial perspectives with which worlds are viewed. I propose the term cyborg vision to account for this simultaneously human and nonhuman vision that’s both pluralistic and situated and argue that, through cyborg vision, digital games offer an embodied experience of surveillance that’s going to be increasingly relevant in the future.
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14517
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
The Early Criminal Record on the Boundary of Entertainment: Thomas F.
Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America and the Spectacle of Criminal
Identification
- Authors: Charles Brackett
  Pages: 157 - 171
  Abstract: While the proliferation of criminal records has received much recent attention, the origin of the criminal record in the United States itself is relatively obscure. This article examines an episode in the development of criminal record keeping and lateral surveillance in the United States, the publication and reception of Thomas F. Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America ([1886] 1969). I argue that Professional Criminals of America developed a cultural purchase well beyond its relatively modest circulation. By exploiting anxieties about mobility, anonymity, and the decline of class distinction, Byrnes’ book sold itself as a tool to develop regimes of lateral surveillance, enlisting regular citizens to support the police by spying on one another.
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14466
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Facing Surveillance: Personified Surveillance, Algorithmic Injustice, and
the Myth of Big Brother in Post-Snowden Popular Culture
- Authors: Nicholas Kelly
  Pages: 172 - 185
  Abstract: This article examines an archive of recent films, fiction, and interactive media that use personified representations of surveillance to depict and critique real-world surveillance practices. It shows how these works, like George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), use personification to depict secretive, complex surveillance networks and convey the supposed meaning of those networks to surveilled subjects: someone is watching you. While such representations of surveillance fail to account for the automated, algorithmic nature of modern surveillance practices and technologies, they dominate the perception of surveillance in the popular imaginary. Such representations contribute to a myth of digital surveillance as active and individualized, a Big Brother vision of surveillance that ignores or erases how automated surveillance and algorithmic evaluation of human beings can reinforce and exacerbate structural inequalities.
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14492
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Conceptions of Privacy in the Digital Era: Perceptions of Slovak Citizens
- Authors: Martin Kovanič, Samuel Spáč
  Pages: 186 - 201
  Abstract: In the digital era, citizens’ daily lives are taking place both in the physical and digital realms. At the same time, even the most mundane activities are increasingly affected by offline as well as online surveillance. The privacy paradigm suggests that there is a difference between the private and public spheres of life, and that with technological advancement the demarcation lines between these spheres have become blurred. As a consequence, citizens’ conceptions of privacy are becoming more fluid, nuanced, context-dependent, and socially determined. This gives rise to a need to reconceptualize what privacy means and how citizens think about its boundaries. To investigate citizens’ conceptions of privacy, we conducted six focus groups in Slovakia aimed at exploring people’s attitudes toward privacy and encompassing their experiences and rationalizations (including possible alterations) of behavior in a variety of everyday environments. The analysis suggests that privacy is a complex phenomenon that is understood as an interplay between different privacy norms guiding specific contexts and more general approaches to privacy. We identify four privacy environments (a controlled private space, a [voluntarily] shared private space, a transactional public space, and a non-controllable public space) and three privacy approaches (the reservations approach, the trade-off approach, and the death of privacy approach) whose interplay constitutes individuals’ conceptions of privacy. In addition, the acceptance of loss of privacy seems to depend on a perception of legitimacy, control over the mechanisms of surveillance that individuals encounter, and trust toward the data processor.
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14099
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Lauer and Lipartito’s Surveillance Capitalism in America
- Authors: Aaron Shapiro
  Pages: 202 - 204
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15574
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Sumner’s Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century
Surveillance
- Authors: Jade Hinchliffe
  Pages: 205 - 206
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15517
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Ström’s Globalization and Surveillance
- Authors: Ana Fernández Inguanzo
  Pages: 207 - 208
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15551
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Birchall’s Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in
Datafied America
- Authors: Muira McCammon
  Pages: 209 - 211
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15549
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Sadowski’s Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting
Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking over the World
- Authors: Bram Visser
  Pages: 212 - 213
  Abstract:
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15533
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of McGregor’s Information Security Essentials: A Guide for
Reporters, Editors, and Newsroom Leaders
- Authors: Philip Di Salvo
  Pages: 214 - 216
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15465
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Stoddart’s The Common Gaze: Surveillance and the Common
Good
- Authors: David Lyon
  Pages: 217 - 218
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15624
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Review of Park’s The Future of Digital Surveillance: Why Digital
Monitoring Will Never Lose Its Appeal in a World of Algorithm-Driven AI
- Authors: Ahmed Alrawi
  Pages: 219 - 220
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15450
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
The Art of Negative Stereotyping: Reframing Blackness in Katrina Andry’s
The Unfit Mommy and Her Spawn Will Wreck Your Comfortable Suburban
Existence (2010) and It’s About Hard Work, Not Crippling Handout for the
Poor (2017)
- Authors: Sarah Koellner
  Pages: 221 - 226
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14893
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)
Security Camera Obscura: Reflecting on the Work of John Marriott
- Authors: Crystal Chokshi, John Marriott
  Pages: 227 - 230
  PubDate: 2022-06-15
  DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.15077
  Issue No: Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022)