(Image taken and edited/modified from the Electronic Frontier Foundation Account on Flickr)
This was written for the university subject, BCM241.
One of the major issues facing the global world in the minds of many people is technology increasing in power and sophistication, and the role it has in surveilling the public. The idea that your smartphone may be spying on what are you doing or that you're being followed through security cameras by forces unknown is a conscious and subconscious panic that many people reckon with on a daily basis. But how much of that is reasonable anxiety and unwarranted hysteria is hard to pin down.
And of course, you can argue that people should conduct further research into what technology can and cannot do, or that they should involve themselves more with FOSS (free and open source software) so that they know what their computer or phone is doing so they, at the very least, have complete control over their own devices. If they want, they could (and arguably should) do things like use an operating system like Linux and only downloading programs that are open source and have been vetted by the wider internet community.
Another idea, however, to determine the potential of public and private surveillance is to use ethnographic study - going out into the world and observing the role of surveillance for yourself and then verifying and backing up that fieldwork with additional online (or offline) research.
In all honesty though, my knowledge of media ethnography is limited to say the very least so I am far and away from being anywhere close to an expert on either media ethnography or surveillance and I'm not sure I ever will be. However, I can still nonetheless argue its merits in understanding and analyzing surveillance of all kinds.
For one thing, it could lead to a greater understanding of social and cultural issues, both recent and not so recent. Take, for example, the Bahrain Uprising of 2011, which is "now primarily articulated along a pro-government versus anti-government divide..." Some involved in the Uprising claimed that social media was "a positive force that democratize[d] information, reinvigorate[d] citizens’ political engagement, encourage[d] freedom of expression and [brought] people together...", but others criticized that social media was "merely a tool, and not necessarily integral to the efficacy of the revolutions as whole..." (Jones, 2013, p. 71). However, as Marc Owen Jones at the University of Durham points out as he references Evgeny Morozov (2011), social media and, by extension, the internet has allowed "authoritarian regimes [to] use the internet as a tool for propaganda, surveillance and censorship..."
This is shown further into his paper where Jones performs his own ethnographic study through intelligent gathering and passive observation and makes note of sock puppet accounts on Twitter created for various members and parties within the Bahraini government like the Ministry of the Interior or Mol. Some pro-regime/government Twitter users would then send messages to these accounts claiming that they were traitors or something of the like. While Jones surmised that it was "doubtful that the ministry [took] such complaints seriously..." (Jones, 2013, p. 82), it's still a clear example of social media, a platform designed for freedom of expression, being twisted to become a means of surveillance - whether that be through alerting the authorities to what someone is allegedly doing or monitoring someone's tweets regardless of if they're pro- or anti-government.
And this is just one example of utilising media ethnography in an albeit heightened and extreme example. But it nonetheless showcases how it can be used to engage with the current goings-on globally and in your own backyard: by observing what is going around you that you can see, and then studying and researching what you can't see.
References:
Jones, MO 2013, 'Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control in the Bahrain Uprising', Westminster Papers, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 71-91.
Morozov, E 2011, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, PublicAffairs, New York, NY.
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