GEH1001/ GEC1000

GLOBALISATION AND NEW MEDIA

Week 8 Lecture
OVERVIEW

01 - Class updates
02 - Week 8 Lecture
03 - Next assessment: Critical
Questions
MID-SEMESTER INFORMAL FEEDBACK

Some concerns with:

1. Managing the readings
2. Flow of the lecture
3. More engaging activities in the tutorial

Purposes of Globalisation and New Media?

Understand the complex nature of globalisation and
be able to write and talk about this complexity, citing
crucial evidence.
Understand the way historical globalisation processes
influence contemporary media and vice versa.
Identify ongoing critical issues in the field of global
media and be able to critically interrogate them.
Survey: Digital Media Use & Surveillance

PollEv.com​/najwaabdullah
WEEK 8

Surveillance and Control

Overview:

The Global Surveillance Industry

From panoptic to predictive surveillance
Contemporary forms and effects of
surveillance: social categorisation, control,
and pacification
HISTORY
 The Global Surveillance Industry
- Ball & Snider Reading -

Surveillance innovations happen through war and the need for population
management, logistics and security

“The logistics of warfare – the need to supply and control large numbers of people in widely dispersed
armies – ... spurred the development of the computer. These wartime connections – the interpersonal,
cultural, political and corporate networks created through this quest – laid the groundwork for cold
war developments and post-war industrial applications” (p. 2).
States depend on corporations such as Marconi, General Electric, General Dynamics, etc to manufacture war
machinaries and manage the logistics of advanced warfare

1942 Ad of General Electric Appliances (Source: Period Paper)

 The ‘military-industrial complex’

World War II era Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (US) Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ (Japan)
 The ‘military-industrial complex’

Universal Turing Machine (Bletchley Park, 1940s) ARPANET's IMP/ first packet-
router (1960s)
 The ‘military-industrial complex’

Data Processing and Data Reduction at the NASA Ames Research Center, EMC. IBM 7090 Data Processing System.
Don Richey
 The ‘military-industrial complex’

“This synergy was made possible by the

‘complementarities’ of government and
corporate ‘needs’, and their mutual and
complementary dependence on –and faith in–
the limitless capabilities of ‘science’, which in
turn depended on state and corporate
funding” (ibid).

Source: Loc's Public Domain Archive

Two-Way State-Corporate Relationship:
States supply companies with basic research,
funding, and infrastructure
Companies supply states with surveillance
technology, capacity, personal, training and
infrastructure

Internet and defence corporations have always

been integrated with state surveillance.
Surveillance Industry Actors

Source: Privacy International

Source: Privacy International
Source: Privacy International
‘Security Aid’

‘Countries with powerful security agencies are spending ...

billions to equip, finance and train security and surveillance
agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes’.

Surveillance aid can:

reinforce authoritarianism
undermine governance
facilitate corruption
illegally equip non-state actors
exacerbate inter-communal tensions

Source: Privacy International

THE PANOPTICON
 Panopticon Prison

“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information” (Foucault, 2012, p. 200).
 Panopticon, Disciplinary Surveillance,
Disciplinary Society

‘The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism

that coerces by means of observation’ (Foucault,
2012, p. 170).

“Hence, the effect of Panopticon is to induce in the

inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility
that assures the automatic functioning of power”
 Panopticon, Disciplinary Surveillance,
Disciplinary Society

Surveillance does not just observe; it sorts and

categorises individuals in terms of what is normal/
abnormal, healthy/ unhealthy. This can lead to
‘othering’ and mutate into different binary forms:
Self versus Other
Friend versus Enemy
Good versus Bad
Desirable versus Undesirable
Etc...
CONTEMPORARY
TIMES
Post-9/11 surveillance industry

Turning point: 9/11 and the ‘War On

Terror’ have supercharged the
surveillance industry
USA Patriot Act (2001) boosted
counter-terrorism effort and
authorised broad surveillance for law
enforcement.

See: epic.org; US Department of Justice

 ‘Surveillance Society’

A surveillance society is governed by a ‘surveillance

state’, which:
“sees surveillance as the solution to complex social
issues”
“collects information on everyone, without regard to
innocence or guilt, and pretends it is not
surveillance” (Privacy International)
“dataveillance on the Web allows the entire
communication process to be turned into a commodity,
packaged and sold” (Ball & Snider, 2013, p. 4)
 ‘Pre-emptive Surveillance’

Surveillance based on the logic of pre-emption rather than

discipline
Pre-emptive rather than deliberative
based on ‘dataveilance’: broad collection of
(electronic and digital) information about everyday
activities, including those of ordinary, law-abiding
citizens, through data harvesting, mining, and
analysis techniques.
Shift from disciplinary to post-disciplinary power
Emphasis on timely detection and deploying the
resources to stop an imminent act before it happens
 ‘Pre-emptive Surveillance’

“rights (to privacy) are subordinated to the need for

total information capture, and responsibilities are
delimited by automated decision-making processes
that rely on information too voluminous for any
individual or group of individuals to comprehend”
(Andrejevic, 2017, p. 880).
 Predictive Policing Platforms

PrePol platform: https://www.predpol.com

 Drones warfare

Invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Russia-Ukraine War

Key event:
2013 - Whistleblower Edward Snowden's
disclosures of NSA's mass surveillance
Previously worked for CIA, Dell, and
Booz Allen Hamilton
Top level security clearance and access
to intelligence data, including those of
the NSA
Been in exile since 2013, after handing
over tens of thousands of classified
documents to journalists Laura Poitras
and Glenn Greenwald
Legacy: end-to-end encryption
NSA Slide from Snowden leak
 Citizenfour Snowden
(2014, dir. Laura Poitras, Documentary) (2016, dir. Oliver Stone, Feature)
Source: Privacy International
 Sensors and smart environments

R&D: Google X
Wearables and self-tracking devices

“the connections between data, bodies and

self-improvement made in the early 20th
century are being repeated today, but with
a twist: where the scale primarily gave the
data to the user to reflect on her own
patterns, the wearable device makes the
user known to a range of other parties”
(Crawford et al, 2015, p. 480)
Digital devices and platforms can
emulate the panoptic effects in the
way it exposes and visibilises its users
to other people and a range of
authorities or powerful entities, many
of whom are unknown.
Contexts and Rhetorics of Surveillance

Rhetoric is the art of effective persuasion and

justification
Surveillance contexts justify themselves
through rhetorical concepts
Main contexts and rhetorics:
Workplace – ‘efficiency, productivity
Commercial – ‘efficiency’ and ‘happiness’
Self – ‘perfection’, ‘betterment’
Social – ‘intimacy’
State – ‘security’, ‘safety’
Post-COVID 19 surveillance (?)
Digitised forms of surveillance are increasingly
ubiquitous and normalised as part of our everyday
lives and requirement for public health safety
While primarily done to overcome the health crisis,
the increased surveillance measures have other
effects:
new products and markets
new contracts, funding opportunities, and
synergies between the government,
corporations, and elements of civil society
Renewed concerns on transparency, independence
of science, privacy, and anonymization
SURVEILLANCE LOGICS
AND EFFECTS
“... surveillance does not merely react to ‘crime’, it
creates ‘truth regimes and constructs target
populations” (Ball & Snider, 2013, p. 3)
1. Social Sorting
Surveillance as an organisational control process shapes
resource use and distribution, manages industries, and creates
standardised practices. However, in the process, it “perpetuates
the interests and voices of certain actors, certain ways of seeing
and doing, and weakens or silences others” (Ball & Snider, 2013,
p. 6)

“…surveillance today sorts people into categories, assigning

worth or risk, in ways that have real effects on their life-
chances. Deep discrimination occurs, thus making surveillance
not merely a matter of personal privacy but of social justice”
(Loyd, 2003, p. 2).
2. Return of racial profiling

When undertaking ‘threat assessment', law enforcers are allowed to consider

political speech, ‘specific and relevant ethnic behavior’, and ‘identify
locations of concentrated ethnic communities’ as a factor.

Sweeping immigration enforcement campaign to deport ‘illegal’ immigrants

and criminal aliens within the nation's borders (Murray, 2010, pp. 14 - 16)
Automation of social sorting

Source: CNET
 Automation of biases

Source: Market Watch Source: Guardian

3. “A cultural climate of vigilance and fear”
Key Takeaways

The Global War on Terror has routinised surveillance and mass harvesting of
information in scale and scope never seen before
‘dataveilance’: reliance on vast amount of data, data mining, capture, and
analysis techniques
focused on future or potential crime or attack rather than actual crime or attack
postponing any engagement with the questions of causality, possibilities of
change, and political solutions
NEXT ASSESSMENT:
CRITICAL QUESTIONS
 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 Week 11
Surveillance & Control Media & Environment Intelligent Technologies & Activism & Alternatives
Automation

Assignment 2: Critical Questions

Identify a specific critical issue nested within the broader readings and transform
this issue into a critical question.
max. 80 words per question
weekly submission on Canvas (between Week 9 and 13)
CRITERIA:

1. A conscientious reading of the texts

2. An understanding of what a critical issue is and how to
identify one within a text
3. A transformation of a critical issue into a question that
aims at further exploring that issue
4. An articulation of a clear, succinct, and elegant issue and
question.

Each criterion is worth 5 points, allowing each question to be

awarded a total mark of 20. Given there are 4 questions, the
total mark for all questions will be the average score (total
marks of 80/4).
WHAT IS A CRITICAL ISSUE?

A socio-political problem that, if addressed or solved, would

help make a change in the world for the better.

There are many critical issues nested within today’s reading and
lecture. Examples:
symbiosis between the state and corporate
science being dependent on state and corporate funding
growing climate of vigilance and fear
social sorting
racial profiling
commodification of entire communication process
Etc
STEPS:

1. Identify an issue that you consider as a critical issue in the

broader readings
Note: You can identify the issue from the required reading or any of
the recommended readings. This won't affect your score.

2. Craft a clear, elegant question that responds to it, and to

which answer is not obvious
WAYS TO ASK A QUESTION:
Historical: How did things get this way? - E.g. How has the post-9/11 post-
disciplinary mode of surveillance become routinised globally?
Present-contextual: What is the current state of this issue? - E.g. How has
the relationship between the state and corporate evolved in post-Covid19
pandemic?
Consequential: What effects has this phenomenon produced? - E.g. What are
the social consequences of the dependence of the scientific community on
state funding?
Speculative: What is likely to happen in the future? - E.g. In what ways can
civil society mitigate such a negative impact of post-disciplinary
surveillance?
Prescriptive: What can be done to fix this problem? - E.g. What can be done
to restore deliberation into contemporary surveillance practice?
Creative: E.g. How can we build a new surveillance technology that can
better address socio-economic inequalities?
Evaluative: How do you measure the problem? - E.g. What criteria
should we use to assess the public benefits of surveillance policy?
Etc...
EXAMPLES FROM STUDENTS’ WORK IN PREVIOUS YEARS:

(Week 8 topic) Ball and Snider posit that the surveillance infrastructure
arose so that nation-states could identify 'the other', whom the state
considered to be a threat. However, states could further engage in
sorting people into groups, even if they were not necessarily a threat to
the state, which is a potential human rights violation. How can the
global civil society, NGOs, and corporations work together to deter states
from wielding such power over their citizens?

(Week 9 topic) Maxwell and Miller argue that new forms of green
citizenship can mitigate the human and environmental degradation
caused by media technologies. Yet citizenship is a national construct, and
this degradation is transnational. Hence, I ask: what power does the
current transnational state (UN, etc.) have for effectively addressing the
e-waste concerns of national citizens?
EXAMPLES FROM STUDENTS’ WORK IN PREVIOUS YEARS:

(Week 10 topic) Srnicek and Williams advocate for a liveable unconditional

basic income (UBI) to usher in a post-work era where labour is optional.
Economically, Singapore relies heavily on a skilled competitive labour force
and low tax rates to attract investments from MNCs. Given that the UBI
requires taxes for wealth distribution and tightens the labour market, how
feasible would the UBI be in her context, given that such a move would
likely be unpopular among MNCs?

(Week 11 topic) Halverson's article celebrated alter-globalisation

movements such as the World Social Forum with its goal to be non-
hierarchical and make collective decisions. However, there are still many
hierarchies and power relationships that exist in these movements due to
the presence of ‘imagineers’ - social actors who possess greater knowledge,
skills and resources that make them a strong driving force in these
movements. As such, how can we wield imagineers' skills and resources
while striking a balance for everyone collectively?
CANVAS SUBMISSION, VIA TURNITIN

1. Submit your question weekly to receive the marks and feedback regularly
You are advised to submit a critical question (CQ)in a week after the
respective lecture.

2. There won't be a penalty if you miss out this date, but there will be some
delays in receiving the marks and feedback for the corresponding question.

*Note: Week 10 Lecture on Intelligent Technologies & Automation will be merged with Week 11 due to the
Public Holiday on Friday 29 March 2024
CANVAS SUBMISSION, VIA TURNITIN

3. To submit your critical question, go to ‘Assignments’, and take a look at the

separate segment on ‘Critical Questions'. Make sure you submit each question
according to the weekly topic:
ON THE FINAL ASSIGNMENT - CRITICAL ISSUE REPORT:

The official deadline of the final essay has to be

shifted to Week 13, precisely on Friday, 19 April, at
23.59.
CNM policy: all Continuous Assessment (CA)
essays have to come in by Week 13
Reference list
Andrejevic, M. (2017). ‘To pre-empt a thief’. International Journal of Communication, 11, 879–896
Ball, Kristie and Snider, Laureen (2013). ‘Introduction: the surveillance-industrial complex: towards a political economy of
surveillance?’. In: (Kirstie Ball and Laureen Snider eds.) The Surveillance-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-8.
Foucault, M., 1926-1984. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York :Pantheon Books,
Lyon, D. (Ed.). (2003). ‘Introduction’. In, Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk, and digital discrimination. New York:
Routledge.
Murray, N. (2010). Profiling in the age of total information awareness. Race & Class, 52(2), 3–24.
Rob Kitchin (2020) Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle
the spread of COVID-19, Space and Polity, 24:3, 362-381
Solove, Daniel J., 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745,
2007, GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=998565

Film.
Citizenfour (2014). Documentary. Directed by Laura Poitras. Produced by Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk
Wilutzky. HBO Documentary Films, Participant Media, Praxis Films.