 |
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
Return to the Current Issue Index
Editorial Articles Presentation Editorial Colin J. Bennett and Priscilla M. Regan — Surveillance and Mobilities.
The editorial introduces the pieces in this special issue on surveillance and mobilities. It draws out the key themes of the issue, asking: what is meant by ‘mobility’ and why it deserves such a focus; what are the goals and purposes of the surveillance of mobilities; and finally, what are the consequences. It proposes a simple typology of mobilities: ‘what moves’ (body, transactions, and artefacts); and ‘movement itself’.
Articles Adam Arvidsson — On the ‘Pre-History of The Panoptic Sort’: Mobility in Market Research. This article reviews the history of market research to argue that that discipline has seen a paradigm shift during the second half of the 20th century. Originally market research developed as an integral element to the society-wide capitalist control revolution. Its aim was to contain the complexity of an increasingly mobile consumer demand in a number of pre-established categories. Since the 1950s however market researchers developed a series of techniques to observe and make use of consumer mobility. The emergence of these new techniques was coupled to a different conception of the role of marketing. Its role was no longer understood primarily as that of disciplining consumer demand, but rather as that of observing and utilizing ideas and innovations that consumer’s themselves produced. This paradigm shift from ‘containment’ to ‘control’ drove the development the statistical techniques and theoretical conceptions of consumers that are now employed in the commercial surveillance of on and off-line mobility. Through ubiquitous surveillance contemporary capitalism aims at including virtually all of social life into its valorization process. The conclusion considers the possible contradictions that this might produce.
Michael R. Curry — The Profiler’s Question And The Treacherous Traveler: Narratives of Belonging in Commercial Aviation. Although criticized as potentially invasive, profiling has recently been promoted as a means for finding potential terrorists, and particularly airplane hijackers. Based upon sophisticated data-mining technologies, new forms of profiling have seemed, whatever the privacy issues that they raise, to offer more objective alternatives to earlier airline profiling systems, which appear to have been based on nothing more than a sense that certain groups of people are not proper passengers, that they are out of place on an airplane. But in fact, the example of geodemographic systems suggests that an inevitable element of profiling is the appeal to sets of simple narratives. Indeed, far from being merely expository devices, such narratives are central to the profile’s analytical structure; as a consequence, while their promoters laud the profiling systems as neutral analytical devices, embedded within them is a sorting system that might more accurately be described as encoding an unstable world of Foucauldian similitudes.
Peter Adey — Secured and Sorted Mobilities: Examples from the Airport.
Surveillance is increasingly focused upon mobility. Be it in cities, shopping malls or outdoor 'public' spaces, surveillance is now able to track and monitor peoples movements. In recent years the most diverse forms of surveillance have been found at airports, yet paradoxically these spaces remain largely invisible within surveillance studies literature. This paper discusses a taxonomy of surveillance at the airport where several scales of mobility intersect – the global movements of international travel to local scale terminal activity. These are put under surveillance by techniques such as the passport and modern CCTV technologies. This paper illustrates the surveillant sorting that is perhaps most illustrative of airport surveillance, where airports can be seen to act as filters (Lyon, 2003) to the mobilities that pass through them. Using an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, trends to monitor the 'means of terrorism' are discussed in regard to the monitoring of objects and actors. The paper continues to critique the way by which we tend to focus chiefly upon the human subject of surveillance, often disregarding the surveillance of non-human actors.
This paper explores the relationship between surveillance technologies and power as exercised in educational spaces. The theories based in the panoptic gaze as theorized by Michel Foucault provide educators with the opportunity to analyze positions of power in school settings. The critical actions of the Surveillance Camera Players represent examples of active embodiment that might inform a form of pedagogy that investigates panopticism within educational spaces.
Trine Fotel and Thyra Uth Thomsen — The Surveillance of Children’s Mobility. The increased protection of children by monitoring them is said to be a central characteristic of modern childhood. In the field of mobility, this aspect of modern childhood is reflected in the fact that children’s everyday mobility is to a great extent kept under surveillance, e.g. by parents, kindergarten or school employees and through general traffic regulation. In this article, we investigate the surveillance of children’s mobility – primarily bicycling, walking and car usage - from three different angles. In the first, we investigate the general power relations in mobile practice that add to the surveillance and restriction of children’s mobility. In the second, we illustrate how parents monitor children’s mobility by chauffeuring them. In the third, we look into how parents remote control children’s mobility by means of behavioural restrictions and technology. By using statistical material and qualitative interviews, we illustrate how parents perceive and perform their own surveillance of children’s mobility. In addition, we comment on how children perceive their monitored mobility and how they cope with it. Finally, we reflect on the differences in parental mobile monitoring and relate this to welfare and socio-economic structures in the families. Gordon A. Gow and Mark Ihnat — Prepaid Mobile Phone Service and the Anonymous Caller: Considering Wireless E9-1-1 in Canada. This paper reports on a recently concluded empirical study into the development of Wireless E9-1-1 (emergency service) in Canada that initially focussed on privacy concerns raised in the context of an emerging location based service (LBS) for mobile phone users. In light of existing regulatory arrangements this paper concludes that in Canada the emerging Wireless E9-1-1 system establishes a reasonable level of protection for the privacy rights of mobile phone users who choose to contact emergency services. However, an important and surprising issue was raised in the proceedings regarding the obligation of wireless service providers offering prepaid mobile phone service to obtain verifiable subscriber records from their customers. This paper provides details regarding the issue and contributes a number of points to an emerging debate concerning the right to anonymity for customers who elect to use prepaid or other services provided over commercial networks.
Nicola Green and Sean Smith — ‘A Spy in your Pocket’? The Regulation of Mobile Data in the UK. The growth of mobile digital communication devices has seen a corresponding growth in the data created by users in the course of their mobile communications. The ease with which such data - including sensitive time-dependent location information - can be collected and stored raises clear data protection and concerns. The value such data offers to both law enforcement agencies and the private sector has complicated regulatory responses to such data protection concerns. This has lead to the contradictory situation in which mobile data is used by the law enforcement agencies and the private sector to identify individual users, yet this same information is not considered to be 'personal data'.
Presentation Janet Chan — 8 Bags. Editorial Articles Presentation
