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October 31, 2007
Surveillance in the everyday, routine sense that we know it today is a product of modernity. Indeed, it is one of the features that define and constitute modernity.The same systems that may be feared for their power to keep track of personal lives are established to protect and enhance life-chances – to promote justice in property holding, or participation in political life.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, mural, CBD Adelaide, 2007
Surveillance always displays these two faces, which means that merely paranoid perspectives are almost always inappropriate. And just as surveillance shows two faces, so its negatively-perceived consequences can always be challenged. What Giddens calls a ‘dialectic of control’ appears to characterize all of the new power alignments of modernity, and surveillance is no exception.
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I should have developed this post further.