SOCIAL CONTROL & TECH
A thought on
Technologies of Speculation
Hong, S
Social Control in the Networked City
Kurt Iveson, K. and Maalsen
“The citizen as a sensor is key to the production of big data and the subsequent management of cities and behaviours. Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants leave a digital trace of themselves and their activities every time they interact with digital devices and infrastructure that are increasingly taken-for-granted technologies of everyday life in cities: mobile phones, credit cards, public transport smartcards, fitness trackers, smart appliances, smart meters, smart grids and the list goes on. The value of these data is in the associated algorithmic and anticipatory logics. (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011)”
Our daily habits are dataficated and turned into curated content – services, news, entertainment, fitness, and well-being – that feeds back into the self-affirming loop of our habits, and as a result, this data loop of habits can be used to maintain or change behaviour, through those curated medias which makes this process an infinite dilemma that might never end! Since they are reproducing themselves from each other, they are feeding off each other’s existence. This loop will repeat itself as long as there are no gaps between us. We will no longer be creating data, instead, we will be the data itself.
The smart devices we surround ourselves with give them access to our private spots, allowing them to reframe our self-knowledge through quantification and to get to know us even better than we do ourselves. Through our smart watches, our wearable technologies, and our cellphone applications, we allow them to track and measure us every day, narrowing our horizons to the surveillance they make over us!
Intimacy always involves vulnerability, and all three authors address this major issue of how close intimacy is exploited and what its consequences may be, since it is a fundamental aspect of technological determinism that technology profoundly shapes social structures and cultural values. The concept of fragile intimacy and surveillance reminds me of data-double representation:
“We are witnessing the formation and coalescence of a new type of body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality and reduces flesh to pure information. Culled from the tentacles of the surveillant assemblage, this new body is our ‘data double’, a double which involves ‘the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self’. (Poster, 1990)”
Essentially, a data double is a virtual representation that is frozen in electronic codes (Bowker & Star, 1999 and Lyon, 2007, p. 88) made up of seemingly opaque data flows (such as audio, smell, chemical, visual, and ultraviolet information). The individual is gathered so as to be governed, commercialized, and controlled (Haggerty & Ericson, p. 613). As a result, these data doubles indicate access to resources, services, and power that are often unknown to the referents (p. 613). And eventually, both corporations and the government are also profiting from this information (p. 616). In the case of credit card theft, many times the data double is treated as more believable than the victim (Lyon, 2007).
In terms of how these data might make governments profited from and how it could affect citizens’ daily lives, you can read, ”why US woman have deleted their period tracking apps due to concerns about data privacy and the security of their personal informationLinks to an external site.”
Finally, I won’t draw any conclusions from all of these as I believe we live in an era that is shifting everything to the unknown, it’s not about screaming into the darkness or neglecting existence, nor is it about praising it. Perhaps we need to reframe things and be more prepared!
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· Kitchin R and Dodge M (2011) Code/Space. Cambridge: MIT Press.
· Bowker, G. & Star, S.L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
· Haggerty, K.D., & Ericson, R. (2000). The Surveillant Assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605-622.
· Lyon, D.(2007). Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Malden: Polity Press.