Monitored Mobility in The Era of Mass Customization

Space and Culture
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Monitored Mobility in the Era of Mass Customization

Mark Andrejevic
Space and Culture 2003; 6; 132
DOI: 10.1177/1206331203251256
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© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Tracing Space
Monitored Mobility in the

Era of Mass Customization
Mark Andrejevic
Fairfield University
Just as Web browsers use information about surfing habits to customize content and advertising,
so the development of mobile commerce (m-commerce) promises to capitalize on the real-time
monitoring of the time-space paths followed by consumers. Thanks to the development of wireless,
networked devices, gathering detailed information about consumer mobility is becoming increas-
ingly cheap and efficient. The result is that spaces associated with leisure and domesticity can be-
come increasingly economically productive insofar as consumers are subjected to comprehensive
monitoring in exchange for the promise of customization and individuation. Drawing on exam-
ples from e-commerce and popular culture, this article explores the connection between the con-
sumption of space and the incitement to mobility, arguing that the mass customized economy rep-
resents a continuation of the logic of market rationalization in the network era.
Keywords: M-commerce; surveillance; reality TV; societies of control; mass customization; mobil-
ity; The Amazing Race
At the dawn of the new millennium, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
praised the dramatic increase in the mobility of the nation’s population as one of the
greatest achievements of the 20th century:
In 1900 the average American traveled about 1,200 miles in a lifetime, mostly on foot,
and mostly within his or her own village or town. By the end of the century, the typical
American adult would travel some 12,000 miles by automobile alone, in just one year.
(National Academy of Engineering, 2000)
space & culture vol. 6 no. 2, may 2003 132-150

DOI: 10.1177/1206331203251256
©2003 Sage Publications
132

T r a c i n g S p a c e 133
Surely this dramatic increase reflected a feat of engineering—of highway building and
automobile making, of designing and constructing the infrastructure for suburban
sprawl and shopping malls—but it also represented a crucial spatial component of the
dramatic increase in levels of consumption and production associated with 20th-
century consumer society. What Lefebvre (1991) described as the “productive con-
sumption” of space associated with increased mobility helped to stimulate a produc-
tive spiral: suburbanization and its associated technologies of mobile and static
privatization increased demand through spatial dispersion. Each household served as
the repository for a private set of appliances that displaced or replaced forms of col-
lective consumption: The automobile displaced the trolley, the radio the concert hall,
the TV set the downtown movie theater, and so on. The demise of collective con-
sumption increased demand for individual consumption thereby helping to absorb
the goods produced by an increasingly rationalized and efficient industrial sector.
Lefebvre provided one example of this spiral in his discussion of what Goodman
called “asphalt’s magic circle”: Government taxes on gasoline are used to build an im-
proved highway system, thereby subsidizing the use of automobiles and increasing the
consumption of gasoline (and space) and in turn promoting the further production
of automobiles (p. 374). As Lefebvre put it,
This sequence of operations implies a productive consumption: the consumption of a

space, and one that is doubly productive in that it produces both surplus value and an-
other space. . . . What actually happens is that a vicious circle is set in train which for all
its circularity is an invasive force serving dominant economic interests. (p. 374)
The fact that Lefebvre refers to this spiral of production as a “strategy” suggests its
association with techniques for the rationalization of production (and of the produc-
tion of space). Indeed, the spatial differentiation associated with the rise of industrial
capitalism offered the promise of individuation as a ruse of rationalization. Subur-
banization offered an escape from urban congestion as surely as it served as a form of
sorting, exclusion, and differentiation. Similarly, the interstate highway system mobi-
lized the myth of the freedom of the road while simultaneously channeling movement
through certain areas and around others. As Deleuze put it, “People can drive infinitely
and ‘freely’ without being confined yet while still being perfectly controlled” (quoted
in Allon, 2001, p. 20). From the very inception of mass society, the promise of differ-
entiation, of freedom—in short, of an escape from its own stultifying homogeneity—
has served as one of its guiding marketing strategies.
As media critics have argued (including Robins and Webster, 1999; Barney, 2000),
the so-called revolutionary promise of new, interactive, media represents not a radical
departure from this strategy but an extension of its logic. The goal of this article is to
explore the way in which this extension manifests itself spatially in the emergent on-
line economy by examining the promise of what the popular press, following the busi-
ness literature, has described as “m-commerce”: the customization of goods and serv-
ices based on the time-space paths followed by consumers during the course of the
day. Short for “mobile commerce,” the term has been championed by the publicists of
the next generation, wireless, Internet, and its associated series of mobile, interactive,
networked devices. The prospect of data-driven mass customization based on contin-
uous, real-time monitoring of consumers continues to be held out as one of the
potential killer applications of wireless, portable media and is being pursued by e-
commerce entrepreneurs such as Cellenium, Vindigo, and Streetbeam. The move from

134 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 3
wired to wireless, interestingly, (re-)mobilizes the spatial strategy described above by

projecting the interactive model of cyberspace back into physical space. The metaphor
of cyberspace has, in other words, come full circle. The portrayal of the Web as a cus-
tomized medium with the interactive capacity to allow users to unfold their unique in-
terests, needs, and desires into the virtual realm by surfing the Net without leaving the
convenience of their homes transposes the promise of the open road into cyberspace
(Microsoft’s “Where do you want to go today?” slogan is exemplary). In this respect,
the promise of the information revolution is predicated on the ability to realize (in vir-
tual space) the myth that remained unfulfilled in the standardized, homogenized, and
congested physical space of mass society. Thanks to portable, interactive devices, one
can leave one’s home without leaving the flexible, interactive, and customized world
of cyberspace. To the extent that the elastic boundaries of cyberspace stretch beyond
the confines of the home or office to contain the physical motion of the mobile con-
sumer, this motion becomes the real-world, physical analog of “surfing the Web.” The
promise of wireless networked technology, from the standpoint of m-commerce, is
thus to inscribe the productive spiral of spatial dispersion into the interactive econ-
omy. Asphalt’s magic circle is overlaid by an electromagnetic one that promises to re-
double its productivity. Consumers’ motions through space open up new informa-
tional dimensions that can be used to further facilitate the consumption of space and
the spatialization of consumption. The interactive overlay is neatly described by ven-
ture capitalist David Bennahum in an article about Vindigo, an interactive city guide
for portable devices such as cell phones and Palm Pilots. The Vindigo headquarters
features a computerized map that tracks the movements of New Yorkers based on in-
formation gathered from their portable devices that is translated into visual form:
Most maps of Manhattan show a straightforward grid of streets. On this one, coagulat-
ing splotches of red portrayed an additional network. The speckles were densest along
vertical axes, where one would expect the avenues to be. They thinned out in perpendi-
cular strands, following what would normally be the side streets. . . . The clustering of
dots around any given point corresponded to the location of restaurants or bars in the
Vindigo database that people had inquired about. The thicker the clump, the more in-
terest people had shown in that particular place. (Bennahum, 2001, p. 160)
The map was not in real time because Vindigo was not fully wireless at the time:
Users downloaded the program from the Internet to their Palm Pilots and received
regular upgrades by connecting their devices with a networked computer. Each down-
load was interactive insofar as it provided new information regarding movie sched-
ules, gallery shows, and so forth, while simultaneously sending information on user
requests back to Vindigo. The future of Vindigo-style applications is the retrieval of
information on a real-time basis so as to transform the map described above into a
fluid tracing of the circulation of consumers through the capillaries of the city. The in-
teractive capacity promises to double back on itself, according to the proponents of m-
commerce: Time-space paths will be used as a strategy for customization. Advertising
and marketing appeals will be directed to consumers based on where they are in time
and space. This is offered up as a subservient form of convenience: an attempt to cater
to individual desires and thereby a form of individualized recognition. Spatial cus-
tomization thereby serves as an incitement to the consumption of space as a form of
productive subjectification. In contrast to the bourgeois interiority associated with the
location of authentic subjectivity in the intimate realm of the home, subjective ex-

Source: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
pression is projected outward through the consumption of space. The invitation of m-

commerce is to specify one’s individuality through motion. The promise of the line of
flight is folded back into the sport utility vehicle (SUV) marketing campaign, and mo-
bility becomes an end in itself. An individual’s time-space path is portrayed as a
uniquely personal expression, precisely because of the excludability of spatio-tempo-
ral location. This uniqueness, however, comes to serve as the obverse of a standardized
form of flexible production: a procedural form of consumption that allows consumers
to customize goods and services according to an evolving set of algorithms. The re-
maining sections of this article attempt to explore the implications of the generalized,
interactive form of monitoring associated with m-commerce and of the promise of in-
dividuation through the consumption of space. I argue against the notion that the ex-
tension of the reach of commercial forms of surveillance facilitated by networked de-
vices represents a radical departure from the productive disciplinary surveillance

associated with the institutions of mass society. Rather, I suggest that m-commerce
represents a deepening and broadening of the rationalization of production and con-
sumption associated with the industrial revolution and the engineering of consumer
society. Finally, I draw on the example of a popular culture artifact—a reality TV show
called The Amazing Race—to illustrate some of the characteristics of the mode of sub-
jectivity associated with the evolving promise of m-commerce. Although reality TV is
frequently written off as one more contrived artifact of the culture industry, it can per-
haps shed some light on the contrived character of reality in an administered world.
Spatialization and the Subject:

Dividuals, Second Selves, and Social Taylorism
It should be noted in advance that the consumption of space as a means of indi-

viduation is, in general, a form of consumption limited to affluent groups (as is the
promise of individuation through the consumption of customized goods and serv-
ices). As Morley (2000), quoting Massey, observed, the mobility of affluent classes is
“quite different from the mobility of the international refugee or the unemployed mi-
grant as a social experience” (p. 200)—not to mention the immobility of groups of
people unable to relocate from regions of poverty, famine, and warfare. Echoing Fou-
cault, it is tempting to observe that the bourgeoisie have endowed themselves with a
“garrulous mobility”—one that permeates the ads for cell phones, cruise lines, and
SUVs—and that just as there is a bourgeois form of monitored mobility, there are also
class mobilities (subject to rather different forms of surveillance). Which is not to say
that other groups are excluded from spatial monitoring but rather that much of this
monitoring is devoted to the forms of sorting and exclusion described by Gandy
(1993) and Lyon (1994). Indeed, the law enforcement correlative to consumer moni-
toring, especially in the newly terrorism-conscious United States, is what Marx (1988)
has described as categorical suspicion: Monitoring is not limited to particular suspects
but is universalized to figure out who the suspects might be. Of late, the spatial com-
ponent of this type of monitoring has been developed as a technique to permit the au-
tomated recognition of criminal activity: Computers are programmed to recognize, in
their monitoring of a particular space, interaction patterns associated with criminal
activity and then to flag those interactions (Riordan, 1997). The intersection of
spatio-temporal paths can be used as hieroglyphic representations of particular kinds
of social interactions—hieroglyphs that reduce the need for human monitoring and
thereby realize a superpanopticon that does not rely merely on the probability of be-
ing watched but on its certainty.
For the purposes of this article, however, the focus will be on the promise of m-
commerce: that spatial expression serves as a form of individuation and hence subjec-
tive expression. Indeed, it is this connection that I draw on to interrogate the model of
rupture influenced by Deleuze’s (1992) oft-quoted declaration of the demise of disci-
plinary society. The rise of so-called societies of control coincides, in his account, with
the demise of disciplinary societies that are predicated on the model of the factory en-
closure: “Everyone knows these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their
expiration periods” (p. 4). Whereas disciplinary societies were associated with the rigid
“molds” of the factory enclosure and the prescripted, repetitive motions of mass pro-
duction, societies of control are characterized by the more flexible paradigm of mod-
ulation: a flexible, “self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one mo-

ment to the next. . . a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point” (p. 4), in
short, a flexible network. Nine-to-five clock punchers are replaced by a flexible, tem-
porary workforce. At the bottom end of the economic scale, this implies the ability of
capital to seek out low-wage workers around the world and to draw on the labor of
low-paid immigrants (many of whom, despite predictions of postindustrialism and
the demise of disciplinary society, continue to work in “old-fashioned” sweatshops).
At the high end, it refers to “always-on-call” professionals who carry their work with
them as they travel the globe and who move from company to company with an in-
creasing degree of frequency: “Work anywhere anytime is the new paradigm. . . . It
amounts to a massive disaggregation of work, spinning outside the walls and confines
of the traditional office” (Hamilton, 1996, p. 106).
Thus, two levels of digital de-differentiation characterize the predictions about the
advent of the wired workforce: first, the spatial-temporal de-differentiation between
places of work, leisure, and domesticity, and second, the de-differentiation between
acts of production and consumption. Robins and Webster (1998, 1999) have argued
that networks provide the “technological means to break the times of working, con-
sumption, and recreation into ‘pellets’ of any duration, which may then be arranged
in complex, individualized configurations and shifted to any part of the day or night”
(Robins and Webster, 1988, p. 8)—or any place of the day or night: hotel room, air-
port, home, café, and so forth. However, the second level suggests that such pellets of
consumption and recreation are also internally de-differentiated: An act of consump-
tion doubles as an act of production to the extent that it generates what Mosco (1996)
calls a cybernetic—or feedback—commodity. Through this de-differentiation, “‘free’
time becomes increasingly subordinated to the ‘labor’ of consumption” (Robins and
Webster, 1998, p. 52), or what Lefebvre (1991) described as productive consumption.
This de-differentiation is enabled by the potential of interactive networks to capture
the so-called feedback generated by consumers and workers as they conduct their ac-
tivities within a monitored, mobile, virtual enclosure. Deleuze’s (1992) version of
modulation is defined by this kind of interactivity: the sieve adjusts itself in confor-
mance with the details of its interstices, the workers and consumers who are redou-
bled by the digital maps of their actions. He described the emergence of the informa-
tional doppelganger of the individual with the term dividual. Similarly, Mark Poster
(1990) used the notion of the “second self ” of the data bank, and Agre (1996) that of
the “digital shadow” to account for the same phenomenon of redoubling. On their ac-
counts, the de-differentiation of consumption from production goes hand in hand
with the redoubling of the consuming subject.
The Deleuze-inspired approach of Alliez and Feher (1987) interprets this process
of de-differentiation/redoubling as a fundamental shift in capital-labor relations: “The
regime in which the worker is subject to capital is fading, gradually being replaced by
a regime in which individuals are enslaved by, or rather, incorporated into, capital” (p.
317). The result, they argue, is that the formal equality between worker and capitalist
associated with industrial capitalism passes over into substantive equality: “Their
identity. . . becomes one of substance since they are both integral parts of capital and
as such are both supposed to identify with its accumulation” (p. 317). This develop-
ment is symptomatic of the inability of the worker to “choose” to enter into a work re-
lation. To the extent that the monitored enclosure has, effectively, stretched outward
to embrace all spaces of human activity, thereby rendering all spaces productive from
the perspective of capital, the worker no longer faces the forced choice characteristic
of capitalism (the freedom of agency associated with the wage-labor contract is pred-

icated on the assumption that workers are “free” not to sell their labor power on the
market; this freedom is the basis of the assertion of formal equality between worker
and capitalist: both “choose” to enter into a contract). The result is what Alliez and Fe-
her described as a form of enslavement to capital: “Enslavement implies the mutual as-
similation of man and machine and man’s new conception of himself as human cap-
ital” (p. 348). The interesting corollary is that the basis of modern subjectivity (and
subjection) itself is eroded, according to this account: “It is the very crossing of bound-
aries between sectors—going to the factory, going to school, to the supermarket—that
actualizes individuals’ freedom while guaranteeing their subjection” (p. 345). Subjec-
tivity ostensibly migrates into the abstract agency of the self-proliferation of capital,
to which workers and capitalists are both subsumed.
Although the account draws some interesting observations about the process of de-
differentiation, it defaults to a technologized determinism: the autonomization of
capital itself. However, as I will argue in the following section, rumors of the death of
subjectification/subjection are greatly exaggerated. The de-differentiation described
by Alliez and Feher (1987) is not quite as clear-cut as they suggest. The subsumption
of consumption to production is integral to industrial capitalism and is by no means
a new development. Rather, industrial capitalism is centrally predicated on the pro-
ductive character of consumption, an observation that was central to Marx’s own un-
derstanding of capitalism, according to Harvey (1999): “Production and consumption
relate to each other so that ‘each of them creates the other in completing itself, and cre-
ates itself as the other’” (p. 80). At the same time, the distinction between the two con-
tinues to be both an internal and a necessary aspect of capitalism’s reproduction: “The
general conclusion that Marx reaches is not that production, distribution, exchange,
and consumption are identical, but that they all form members of a totality, differ-
ences within a unity’” (p. 41). The model of rupture implied by the purported decline
of disciplinary society has a tendency to collapse the dialectical relationship of pro-
duction and consumption and thereby to underwrite—however unintentionally—the
portrayal of interactive technology as empowering to its users. Once consumers and
producers are equated, the power relations that structure their interactions fade into
the background. Thus, in an oft-quoted paean to the information revolution, Derrick
De Kerckhove claimed that “in a networked society, the real power shift is from the
producer to the consumer, and there is a redistribution of controls and power”
(quoted in Kelly, 1996).
The model of rupture likewise dismisses the importance of centralized forms of
disciplinary control and surveillance. For example, Mules (2001), following Delueze,
suggests that
in the control society there is no need for this kind of [top-down] panoptic control, since
the embodiment of the panoptic principle, anticipated by Foucault and responsible for
the individuation of the subject in disciplinary societies, has itself become a resource for
extracting surplus value. In effect, dividualised workers survey themselves, not as a form
of self-discipline, but as an investment for capitalization. (para. 25)
This formula pushes Foucault’s version of micropower to its extreme: There are no
centralized, organized strategies of power, merely internalized disciplinary forces that
miraculously, coincidentally, coalesce in ways that further the proliferation and repro-
duction of capital. However, Foucault (1972) himself provides the grounds for quali-
fying this extremism, suggesting an approach that is slightly more dialectical than that

of many of his followers: “Generally speaking I think one needs to look rather at how
the great strategies of power encrust themselves and depend for their conditions of ex-
ercise on the level of the micro-relations of power” (p. 199).
In brief, the assertion of the demise of disciplinary society is overstated and mis-
leading, even in the case of developed nations where employee self-monitoring coex-
ists with increasingly comprehensive forms of second- and third-party monitoring.
The theoretical predictions of the demise of the subject (and associated processes of
subjectification) are unhelpful insofar as they do little to shed light on a society in
which consumption continues to be portrayed as a means of individuation and self-
expression—in which the distinction between production and consumption remains
even as the former comes to double as the latter. Moreover, the attempt to assimilate
labor to capital by suggesting, as Mules (2001) does, that workers have become “little”
bourgeois fails to take into account the significant differences between those who con-
trol the means of information production and storage and those who are subjected to
them. Increased storage and data-processing capacity has helped make customization
more cost-effective, and it is within the context of a proprietary database that demo-
graphic information commodities gain their value. The very productivity of con-
sumption relies on the creation of organized databases to which consumers have min-
imal access and over which they have little control. The profitability of demographic
commodities relies not just on the ability of companies to claim proprietary rights to
it but also on the ability to store and manipulate vast quantities of data. Information
that has little value in isolation gains value to the extent that it becomes part of an ex-
tensive database. Thus, the ability of consumers to choose whether or not they enter
into what might be described as the “digital enclosure”—a realm of monitored inter-
activity wherein they surrender information about themselves—increasingly comes to
resemble the forced choice of the wage-labor agreement. Consumers may be “free” not
to interact, but they increasingly find themselves compelled to engage in interactive
exchanges (and to go online) by what Lester (2001) described as “the tyranny of con-
venience” (p. 28). To the extent that goods and services become available only over an
interactive network, the consumer is faced with a forced choice that complements that
of the worker: either submit to monitoring or go without.
All of which suggests that the “new” economy may not be as novel as either its cel-
ebrants or its critics suggest. Standing opposed to the model of discontinuity sug-
gested by both Alliez and Feher (1987) and Mules (2001) is that of continuity outlined
by Robins and Webster (1987, 1998, 1999). On their account, there is nothing partic-
ularly new about the “dividual” or the second self of the database. The “digital
shadow” is a direct descendent of the second self developed by the technicians of sci-
entific management, who created detailed databases documenting the space-time
paths of workers and their activities. The intensive division of labor associated with
the rise of mass production—not its demise—corresponds to the division of the
working subject, as well as with the separation of mental and physical labor, of plan-
ning from execution. As Frederick Taylor, one of the pioneers of scientific manage-
ment, suggests, this doubling produced (and was reinforced by) its own distinct space:
The practical use of scientific data also calls for a room in which to keep the books,
records, etc., and a desk for the planner to work at. Thus all of the planning which under
the old system was done by the workman, as a result of his personal experience, must, of
necessity under the new system be done by the management in accordance with the laws
of the science; because even if the workman was well suited to the development and use

of scientific data, it would be physically impossible for him to work at his machine and
at a desk at the same time. (quoted in Braverman, 1974, p. 115)
The strategy of the circular logic defined by Lefebvre (1991) takes on spatial form
within the scientifically managed workplace: The rationalization of production re-
quires the creation of a separate space, which in turn makes it impossible for the
worker to retain control over the labor process (which would require being in two
places at once). This impossibility underwrites the virtual redoubling of the worker in
the form of the database: detailed information about the worker is gathered so that it
can be analyzed, evaluated, and manipulated by managers. The process of modulation
described by Deleuze (1992) is thus not as novel as it might seem, a fact that is per-
haps overlooked thanks to the hype surrounding the promise of mediated interactiv-
ity. Such hype might well be tempered with the recognition that, as Robins and Web-
ster (1999) suggested, the information era was inaugurated by the Industrial
Revolution. Similarly, the information-based rationalization of consumption hear-
kens back to the advent of the marketing and advertising industries in the early 20th
century. The extension of the reach of a monitored digital enclosure to include spaces
of recreation and domesticity continues the monitoring process inaugurated with the
advent of capitalism and further developed and expanded during the Industrial Rev-
olution and the rise of consumer society.
What then to make of the claim that the significant difference between a discipli-
nary society and a society of control lies in the erosion of the institutional boundaries
that underwrite both subjection and subjectification? The thrust of this argument is
that the perceived element of freedom in the forced choice has been eradicated. The
private space of individual autonomy is eroded along with the purely formal assertion
of agency implied by the ability to choose “freely” to enter into a wage-labor contract.
On this account, it is the extension of the virtual space of the monitored enclosure to
embrace spheres of domesticity and leisure that crowds out the private, individual,
“free” space of the subject.
However, as Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality suggests, the notion that the
private sphere in modernity could be distinguished from that of work on the basis of
a relative freedom from monitoring is patently false. The detailed monitoring, catego-
rization, and engineering of the most intimate practices of the private realm has, on
Foucault’s (1978) account, a directly productive, economic function: the marshalling
and management of biopower. In keeping with Foucault’s account, Alliez and Fehrer
(1987) suggested that the realm of the private—of subjectivity—was not a substantial
space of authentic freedom but rather the empty (formal) projection of the boundary
“between sectors”: an artifact of its own supposed repression. However, this recogni-
tion presses against their own thesis, insofar as it suggests that the ever-more perva-
sive intrusion of the monitoring gaze serves as further incitement to subjectification.
The practical manifestation of this process is the increasing intensity of individuation
in the surveillance-based economy: the self-defeating (and therefore self-stimulating)
attempt to overcome the homogenization of mass society through customization. The
elusive endpoint of capitalist rationalization is not the mass homogenization and stan-
dardization associated with the stereotypical version of Fordism but an infinitely ar-
ticulated individuation, in which each consumer is perfectly (infinitely) specified. Be-
cause the promise of individuation is precisely to overcome this type of rationalization,
what emerges is, once again, the spiraling logic of a strategy: Specification both stim-

ulates and thwarts the drive for individuation by offering a solution that exacerbates
the problem it ostensibly solved.
There is, however, an element of truth to the notion that the expansion of produc-
tive monitoring represents a relatively new development, precisely insofar as this mon-
itoring greatly reduces the cost of generating information commodities that can be
bought and sold. The carceral gaze of the prison, the school, and the confessional help
to render the body politically docile and economically productive but do not trans-
form the activity of being watched into work per se. It is this transformation that the
generalization of economic surveillance promises to achieve: the exploitation of the
fact that the activity of being watched can generate surplus value, insofar as the value
of a cybernetic commodity exceeds its production cost (the minimum of convenience
or customization required to induce a consumer to relinquish personal data or to sub-
mit to detailed forms of monitoring). To the extent that this cost approaches zero in
cases in which consumers are unaware that they are being monitored, the value real-
ized in the resale of a demographic commodity need not be especially high for moni-
toring to become profitable.
All of which is to suggest that even if the generalization of surveillance seems to
eradicate the boundaries constitutive of the illusion of the free exchange of labor, an-
other set of boundaries continues to underwrite the distinction between production
and consumption and hence the process of subjection/subjectification: the distinction
between those who own and control the means of surveillance/data storage and those
who are forced to submit to them as the condition for entering into a transaction. The
paradox of Alliez and Fehrer’s (1987) account is that even as it describes the collapse
of the formal equality of worker and capitalist into substantive equality, it notes that
the economic surplus generated by surveillance accrues systematically to one class.
Their account intriguingly de-emphasizes this distinction, which is nevertheless cru-
cial, insofar as it distinguishes the status of worker—the “little bourgeois” referenced
by Mules (2001)—from the capitalist proper. Despite the generalization of surveil-
lance that enables consumption to double as production, the equality between worker
and capitalist still remains at the purely formal level. This can be seen in practice by
the systematic accrual of the surplus value generated by information commodities to
those who own the means of “dataveillance” as well as by the purely formal promise of
equality in the realm of consumption that complements the formal equality of the
wage-labor contract. The promise of the interactive economy—one repeatedly re-
hearsed by its propagandists—is that submission to detailed forms of demographic
monitoring amounts to a form of shared control over the production process. Thanks
to the development of cost-effective monitoring techniques (heavily dependent on in-
teractive technologies) and flexible manufacturing systems, consumers are told that
they are now, more than ever, “in the driver’s seat”: that they are taking the place of the
managers who once decided for them what products would be produced for whom.
This promise, of course, is a purely formal one. Consumers are free to customize the
goods and services they receive—and to pay a premium for this customization—but
such freedom of choice in no way amounts to control over the production process in
a substantive sense. The “rules” for interaction and the profits generated by both cus-
tomization and by the sale of demographic commodities remain in the control of
those who own the means of data collection, storage, and manipulation. The formal
promise of participation in the realm of consumption thus parallels the formal prom-
ise of equality within the context of the wage-labor contract.

The result is that the rumors of the death of the subject—and of disciplinary soci-
ety—have been greatly exaggerated. Spatial de-differentiation and the associated uni-
versalization of the monitoring gaze do not obliterate the distinctions that underwrite
subjectification. Within the context of m-commerce, they come to serve as a ruse of
subjection: The consumption of space is portrayed as a means of individuation. The
unfolding of one’s time-space path, on this account, serves as a unique identifier that
ostensibly overcomes the homogenization of mass society. Indeed, m-commerce pro-
vides the symbolic resolution to the postmodern plight of bodies “bereft of spatial co-
ordinates and practically. . . incapable of distantiation” described by Jameson (1991, p.
28). The promise on offer is that of a customized form of orientation available on de-
mand: Consumers may not get the “god’s eye” point of view offered by Vindigo’s map
of Manhattan, but they do not need it. The presumption seems to be that in a daunt-
ingly complex world, they do not want to try to absorb a comprehensive global de-
scription. All they need to be able to do is to get from their current location to the next
one and to have their trajectories organized for them—tasks facilitated by wireless in-
teractive devices and schedule planners. Indeed, the goal of personal digital assistants,
electronic planners, and so on seems to be to locate the extensive body of information
associated with contemporary navigation/planning outside of oneself so as not to have
to have it cluttering one’s memory. Moreover, the uniqueness of their time-space paths
comes to serve as a marker of individuation and a form of self-expression. Subjection
to interactive surveillance becomes the precondition for orientation and, at the same
time, a form of individual expression. The following section attempts to trace the re-
lationship between the incitement to individuation and the monitored consumption
of space by drawing on an example from contemporary popular culture: the reality
game show The Amazing Race, which thematizes the expressive role of mobility within
the de-differentiated context of the information era.
The Mobile Subject and the New Space Race
Reality TV provides an intriguing example of the contemporary trajectory of de-

differentiation because it enacts the role of surveillance in transforming leisure time
and domestic activities into a form of value-generating labor. Thanks to the pervasive
and intrusive role of the camera, people going about their daily lives, socializing, fight-
ing, and flirting, become round-the-clock workers: low-paid workers generating rela-
tively inexpensive but commercially lucrative television programming. Consider, for
example, the case of a relatively popular reality series in the United States called The
Amazing Race that documents the travels of 10 two-person teams engaged in a race
around the world that typically covers more than 50,000 miles in a 30-day period: In
other words, more miles in a single day than the average U.S. resident traveled in a life-
time 100 years ago). The game-show element of the series consists of the fact that the
teams are competing for a $1 million grand prize as well as for a series of smaller prizes
awarded for winning each stage of the race. The teams are made up of a variety of dif-
ferent pairings: best friends, siblings, parents and children, lovers, husbands and wives,
and so on. The comprehensive documentation of the cast members’ interactions—
their round-the-clock submission to the TV cameras—is what transforms the leisure-
time activity of tourism into work. The contestants are working for the producers lit-
erally around the clock for a full television season in exchange for a chance to win the

game’s $1 million grand prize. Thus, the central point to be made with respect to the
version of tourism portrayed by The Amazing Race is that it participates in a redou-
bled cycle of production: As they buy souvenirs, visit exotic locales, and set up their
travel itineraries, the cast members’ actions are documented for resale. Each act of
consumption doubles as an act of production thanks to the portable cameras and mo-
bile production crews that follow the contestants around the world (but rarely appear
on the show itself).
Significantly, the problem faced by the cast members is precisely that identified by
Jameson (1991), that of locating themselves in an ever-shifting landscape in which his-
tory, nature, and culture are all reduced to what Urry (1995) described as “signs of
themselves”: geographic game pieces in a global scavenger hunt. In fact, a central
theme and plot device of the show is the problem of orientation: The cast members
are repeatedly depicted in the process of trying to determine their location and its re-
lationship to the coordinates of their next assigned destination. Suggestively, they are
portrayed in precisely the scenario that a portable global positioning system device en-
visions. It is hard not to see them poring over a map as they insistently drive in the
wrong direction without imagining the implicit technological resolution: a device that
could recognize their particular location and guide them step by step to their destina-
tion. On occasion, this implicit resolution is made explicit by the starring role given,
for example, to a cell phone that allows two lost team members to set their taxi driver
on course during a crucial moment of the race. Not surprisingly, one of the show’s
main sponsors was Verizon, whose spots featured a cell phone tester traveling to re-
mote locations and saying into the phone “Can you hear me now?” The segue between
show and ad seemed at times seamless, at least when the cell phone was playing the
starring role in both. Indeed, the example of reality TV suggests one more front for de-
differentiation: the border between content and advertising. Mark Burnett, the pro-
ducer of the phenomenally successful reality show Survivor, has made a point of using
the format to help merge advertising and content by allowing sponsor products to be
woven into the show’s narrative. In an era when digital technology allows users to skip
ads, this kind of product placement is, as he put it, “the future of television” (Good-
man, 2001). If orientation is one of the problems featured in the content of the show,
it is also one of the preoccupations of the advertising.
Intriguingly, the theme of orientation enacts the connection between the promise
of spatial individuation and the shift to a networked version of mobility. Periodically,
each of the teams asserts their own individuality by refusing to work with one another
and deliberately choosing to follow their own path. Indeed, one episode featured
members of each team starting out by saying that they felt their strength lay in the fact
that they go their own way. The logic of the show encourages this differentiation, in-
sofar as teamwork has the disadvantage that everyone follows the same path and ar-
rives at the same time. The differentiation of paths helps separate out the teams and
presumably rewards the winners on the basis of their individual abilities. Thus, at cru-
cial moments—when, for example, the teams were faced with a choice of challenges to
complete—they often tried to do the opposite of what they thought the “pack” would
do. The ability to follow different time-space came to help define the different charac-
ter and ability of the teams and to express their personalities. During the show’s sec-
ond season, for example, Danny and Oswald, who were described on the show as best
friends and were rated on the show’s official fan site as the most popular contestants,
made a point of not working with other teams and ignoring them or hiding from
them when their paths crossed.

The challenge of devising an idiosyncratic path to gain a competitive edge was cou-
pled with the challenge of navigating the globe piecemeal. From day to day, the con-
testants had little idea where they would be headed next, receiving instructions for the
next destination only upon arrival at the previous one. In this respect, the challenge of
perpetual reorientation took on the character of what Suchman (1987) described as
“situated action.” Rather than being able to plan an itinerary in advance, the racers had
to reorient themselves with each new set of instructions, continually searching out
new locations and evaluating alternative paths and modes of transportation. The goal
was to solve problems as they arose, rather than trying to anticipate all possible tra-
jectories at once. The model is an appropriate one for the information economy: In a
world characterized by information glut, the goal is not to master the totality of avail-
able facts (an impossible task) but to seek out what one needs as one goes along. In
this respect, the model seems to embody the promise of networked decentralization,
of postmodernism’s ostensible challenge to hierarchical authority, and of the democ-
ratizing thrust of a more flexible, customized economy. A standardized body of infor-
mation is not as useful to the situated actor as is a set of customized instructions tai-
lored to the actor’s needs at a particular point in time and space. This, according to the
celebrants of the new economy, was precisely the need that could not be filled by the
standardized forms of production and delivery associated with industrialized mass
production for most of the 20th century. Against the background of flexible produc-
tion, mass production is portrayed as centralized, rigid, and, fundamentally, undemo-
cratic: A small group of people decide what will be made available to the majority of
consumers. By contrast, customization is offered as a means of counteracting the un-
democratic, hierarchical, and homogenizing character of mass society: It is the latest
symbolic resolution to the contradictions of industrial capitalism.
However, the logic of The Amazing Race gives the lie to the promise of democrati-
zation and empowerment associated with customization and with the “customer-is-
in-control” publicity of m-commerce. The show’s cast members enjoyed relative free-
dom in their choice of paths, and their attempts to navigate the labyrinthine streets of
a market in, for example, Hong Kong or Bangkok recalled De Certeau’s (1993) de-
scription of pedestrians whose paths trace individual and evanescent expressions of
their unique interactions: “They are walkers. . . whose bodies follow the thicks and
thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (p. 128). For De
Certeau, these texts resist totalization precisely because they fall below the “threshold
at which visibility begins” (p. 128). The countergesture of The Amazing Race and also
of m-commerce is to lower this threshold, perhaps until it disappears. Indeed, part of
the appeal of reality TV might well be that of the celestial point of view that so
tempted Icarus, according to De Certeau:
His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the
bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It
allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. (p. 127)
Reality TV caters to what De Certeau describes as the erotics of this kind of knowl-
edge: “this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (p. 127). The viewer is invited to
gain that distance, which, paradoxically, enables an intimate and omniscient view-
point. The viewer/voyeur is invited to take a step outside of reality, which is separated
from the viewers and projected onto the screen, where it can be viewed as a legible
text. The parallel between reality TV and m-commerce is the attempt to realize the ce-

Source: Courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
lestial gaze that makes the complexity of spatial practice legible (recordable) in order
to exploit the productive, creative character of what De Certeau described as “the cho-
rus of idle footsteps,” practices that inscribe unique uses of space across the landscape.
The Vindigo map of Manhattan similarly materializes the perspective of the celestial
eye, providing a fluid counterpart to the synchrony of the static map whose limits De
Certeau traces.
The Amazing Race thus provides a graphic reminder of the ever-present monitor-
ing gaze that potentially complements the free-form flexibility of networked interac-
tivity. Under this gaze, the individuation that ostensibly represents liberation from the
standardized homogeneity of mass society enacts the extension and not the abolition
of its logic. Individuation and customization facilitate efficiency, just as the freedom
of data packets on the Internet to take a multitude of different routes represents an ef-
ficient solution to the problem of data transfer. Independence of movement does not
necessarily undermine centralized control but can help facilitate it. Similarly, special-
ization is not a postindustrial development but is characteristic of centralized plan-
ning itself, which sought to profit by differentiating tasks so as to ensure that skilled
workers were not performing tasks that could be done more cheaply by others. The re-
lationship between homogenization and differentiation in mass society is not one of

opposition but, as Huxley’s (1969) Brave New World suggests, complementarity: Stan-
dardization goes hand-in-hand with differentiation.
This relationship can easily be seen in the way that The Amazing Race reduces the
diversity of geographic, cultural, and historical landmarks to the status of signs of
themselves: chips in the game to be collected one after another by highly mobile con-
sumers. In a typical episode, the contestants might visit several airports (en route), a
vineyard, a township marketplace, a local harbor, and Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on
Robben Island. Each of these becomes one more place marker to be visited as rapidly
as possible. Indeed, the cast members run in and out of a taxi station as quickly as they
visit Mandela’s prison cell. The journey displaces the destination in a manner that
highlights the overlap between the new-age ethos and the reversal of means and ends
characteristic of capitalism. If consumption becomes an end in itself, insofar as it dou-
bles as a form of self-expression, the same can be said of the consumption of space en-
acted by the cast of The Amazing Race. The goal of this kind of travel is not to arrive
anywhere per se but to express oneself through the process of travel itself. Yes, there is
a cash reward for some of the contestants, but they know that the majority of the par-
ticipants will not win and will have to content themselves with the benefits of the
travel “experience.”
Interestingly, this recourse to the benefits of the “experience” recurs frequently
within the context of reality TV, which is predicated on the exploitation of cheap la-
bor. The ostensible nonmonetary compensation offered to cast members is the prom-
ise of access to a new and challenging experience that will allow them to benefit from
what they learn about themselves through submission to round-the-clock monitoring
and by seeing themselves on TV (see, on this point, the discussion of The Real World
in Andrejevic, 2002). It is a commonplace of reality shows based on comprehensive
surveillance, such as Survivor, Big Brother, and The Real World, that cast members are
portrayed describing how much they have learned about themselves and grown as in-
dividuals thanks to their experience on the show.
The Amazing Race is no exception, insofar as each episode features a short interview
with the cast members who have been eliminated describing what they have gained
from being on the show. Similar observations are included during the course of the
race as contestants reflect on what they are learning about themselves and their part-
ners thanks to the stressful situations in which they have been placed. Thus, for ex-
ample, Wil and Tara, a separated couple who are team members in the show’s second
season, portrayed the race as an opportunity to learn whether they will stay together
or get a divorce. They decided, after winning the second-place prize, to divorce. De-
spite Wil and Tara’s split, the siblings, friends, and lovers on the show frequently de-
scribe the experience as one that deepened and strengthened their relationships, as
well as one that taught them about themselves and the world. Russell, who was paired
with his wife, observed after being eliminated from the competition that he had
gained greater respect and affection for her, thanks to the experience: “She did things
I never would have been able to do. . . . I’m more in love with her now than I ever have
been” (The Amazing Race, April 3, 2002). The standard sentiment—one echoed by al-
most all of the cast members at some point during the course of the show—was
summed up by Peach, who was in a sibling team with her sister, “I have changed so
much since this race started: I’ve done a lot of things, met a lot of people and gone a
lot of places that I never would have seen otherwise” (The Amazing Race, April 17,
2002).

As in the case of customized commerce, the monitored consumption of space por-

trayed in The Amazing Race doubles not only as a productive act but as an expressive
one. The compensation offered to consumers in exchange for their submission to
comprehensive surveillance is their own individuation. Intriguingly, another set of re-
wards offered by the show’s sponsors to cast members who won a stage of the race was
the offer of future travel from sponsors including Royal Caribbean Cruises. Viewers
were treated to the spectacle of weary voyagers who just completed a 5,000-mile trip
offered the reward of a trip to France or a cruise to Mexico. As in the case of
consumption generally, the goal is further consumption: Travel begets travel. The
contestants in The Amazing Race enact the role of “collectors of gazes,” as Urry (1995,
p. 138) put it, in a double sense: by collecting sights of sites both natural and cultural
at an unprecedented rate and by attracting the gaze of viewers in a productive
fashion. In this respect, they thematize the dual nature of the process of subjection/
subjectification: the intermediate or split nature of subjectivity, rather than the oblit-
eration of subjectivity proper. Indeed, they help highlight the falsity of the notion that
there is a fundamental rapture (rather than an abiding continuity) between discipli-
nary societies and societies of control. The advent of the dividual or the second self re-
capitulates the fact that the modern subject is redoubled from its inception, precisely
insofar as it becomes the object of its own self-reflection. The will-to-knowledge de-
scribed by Foucault (1978) enacts the self-stimulating spiral associated with this re-
doubling. Tellingly, with respect to a consideration of the logic of reality TV, Lacan
(1998) associates this spiral with the logic of the drive in general and the scopic drive
in particular. His discussion of the latter neatly encapsulates the intermediate position
occupied by the subjects of the “tourist” gaze on The Amazing Race. In Lacan’s terms,
the true character of the scopic drive—of voyeurism proper—is revealed in its reflex-
ive character: “What is involved in the drive is making oneself seen” (p. 195). The
global tourist of The Amazing Race, scouring the world for sights that they otherwise
would never have seen, are simultaneously making themselves seen. In this respect,
they enact what Zizek (2000), following Lacan, described as the process of “actively
sustaining the scene of one’s own passive submission” (p. 284). This formulation
might also be read as a description of the logic of the confessional outlined by Fou-
cault (1978) insofar as it neatly captures the double meaning (and the doubled gram-
matical function) of subject. Submission as a form of self-expression is not just the
logic of m-commerce or reality TV but of subjectivity proper, a form that endures in
the era of the society of control.
Conclusion
If, as Urry (1995) suggested, the “modern subject is a subject on the move,” it is pre-
cisely this form of subjectivity that is envisioned by the purveyors of m-commerce.
The virtual forms of this mobility have already multiplied in cyberspace: the incite-
ment to surf not just through the myriad informational and commercial sites available
online but amidst the proliferating array of programming available on television. The
increasing diversity and specialization of this programming allow for the ever-more
detailed specification of consumer desire by marketers and advertisers. To the extent
that channel surfing and Web surfing can be inexpensively monitored, tracked, and
sorted thanks to the interactive capability of new media, this virtual mobility repre-

sents a new frontier for the creation of demographic commodities. At the same time,
it habituates consumers to the promise that submission to pervasive monitoring rep-
resents a form of empowerment and, increasingly, a form of security. This positive
portrayal of consumer surveillance in recent years may perhaps be reinforced by the
rehabilitation of the portrayal of state surveillance in the wake of the terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Interestingly, the heightened mobility associated with the information era has
taken place, stereotypically, within the context of the physical stasis represented by the
couch or keyboard potato, hunkered down before a glowing screen. Network interac-
tivity has been portrayed as a way of allowing users to shop, work, and socialize with-
out leaving the physical space of the home. The (re-)transformation of the home into
a site for this variety of activities might be considered the first step in the de-differen-
tiation process enabled by the development of networked interactivity. The next
step—that envisioned by e-commerce—is the extension of this de-differentiation into
any space that can be subjected to the monitoring gaze facilitated by portable, net-
worked devices. This extension also represents the double logic of enhanced produc-
tivity facilitated by the de-differentiation process. On one hand, thanks to telecom-
muting technology, the home can become a work site. At the same time, thanks to the
development of interactive devices, leisure-time activities can become productive, to
the extent that they take place within a monitored space and generate demographic
commodities.
If the individual specification of desire can work in the online monitored enclo-
sure, it might be even more productive in the physical realm where mobility has long
been correlated with increased consumption. Just as formerly immobile devices such
as television and personal computers are going mobile (in cars, planes, and handheld
devices), the monitoring capacity of wireless interactivity promises to track this mo-
bility. The difference between a portable TV, and a (as of yet hypothetical) portable
TiVo, for example, would reside in the ability of the latter to provide content produc-
ers (and advertisers) with detailed information about who is watching what, when,
and—eventually—where. Product placement and marketing appeals could then adapt
flexibly to the spatio-temporal trajectory of users: Instead of receiving personalized
ads for nearby shops on their cell phones or Palm Pilots, they might hear them on
their portable radios or automobile TV consoles, along with custom-tailored direc-
tions. In an increasingly customized marketplace, the spatial dimension becomes one
more way to differentiate marketing appeals, goods, and services. Perhaps the engi-
neering triumph of the coming century will be not the dramatic increase in the mo-
bility of subjects so much as the dramatic increase in the ability of producers to mon-
itor and capitalize on that mobility.
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Mark Andrejevic is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Fairfield

University. He writes and teaches in the area of new media and cultural studies and has pub-
lished articles on surveillance and reality TV.


Monitored Mobility in The Era of Mass Customization

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Space and Culture

Monitored Mobility in the Era of Mass Customization

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Monitored Mobility in the

space & culture vol. 6 no. 2, may 2003 132-150

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This sequence of operations implies a productive consumption: the consumption of a

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wired to wireless, interestingly, (re-)mobilizes the spatial strategy described above by

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Source: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

pression is projected outward through the consumption of space. The invitation of m-

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Spatialization and the Subject:

It should be noted in advance that the consumption of space as a means of indi-

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Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

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The Mobile Subject and the New Space Race

Reality TV provides an intriguing example of the contemporary trajectory of de-

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

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Source: Courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

As in the case of customized commerce, the monitored consumption of space por-

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Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

Mark Andrejevic is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Fairfield

Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com by Dimitris Agouridas on November 8, 2007

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