Philip Agre
Philip E. Agre is a former associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His new media writing includes the essay, Surveillance and Capture. He was successively the publisher of The Network Observer (TNO) and The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). TNO ran from January 1994 until July 1996. RRE, an influential mailing list he started in the mid-1990s, ran for around a decade. A mix of news, Internet policy and politics, RRE served as a model for many of today's political blogs and online newsletters.[1]
Prior to his teaching position at UCLA, Agre held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (now the School of Informatics) at the University of Sussex and the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 1989.[2]
Surveillance and Capture
Background
Agre's essay Surveillance and Capture deals with privacy and surveillance issues made possible by our constantly evolving technological age. Influential works preceding this essay include George Orwell's 1984, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Constituents of a Theory of the Media, and Michel Foucault's works surrounding the concept of panopticism.[3]
Enzensberger dismisses Orwell's vision of total surveillance as fantasy, claiming that the technological systems required would be impractical and, of necessity, "become the largest branch of industry in its society".[4]
Foucault, however, challenges this impracticality claim with his notion of panopticism. Panopticism derives its name from the panopticon, a thought experiment about prison design conceived by Jeremy Bentham (before the advent of electronic surveillance systems). In essence, a panopticon consists of a central guard tower able to see every prison cell (aided by backlights), while no inmates are able to see within the tower.[3] What results is a permanent, psychologically-ingrained power structure in which inmates are forced to monitor themselves, accepting the possibility that they may be watched at all times. Foucault argues that a constant exercise of such surveillance is not necessary, since its mere possibility induces self-restrained action among the inmates.[3]
This surveillance model of privacy, present in Foucault's work, has been the dominant model for most discourse about privacy in the new media field.[3] It fails, however, to fully address certain aspects of the technical elements of new media, including ways in which computers can provide effective privacy-enhancing technologies. In Surveillance and Capture, Agre presents the capture model, drawn from an awareness of the current methods of computer design. Just as the inmates of the panopticon internalize their surveillance and alter their behavior accordingly, so too do parties on the internet, knowing the possibilities of electronic information retrieval.[3]
References
- ^ http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/11/the_mysterious_disappearance_o.html
- ^ http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14422
- ^ a b c d e Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy." The New Media Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003. 737-760. Print.
- ^ Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. "Constituents of a Theory of the Media." The New Media Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003. 261-275. Print.