So I was reading Lyon, and he was mostly making sense, arguing good points, but the first time I started to question the extent to which he gives surveillance credit was in the first section when he argues that modern surveillance actually looks INSIDE the body. At first I balked, but then the argument that medical records are available online to people with access or the right hacking knowledge made sense.
On page 12, another argument caught my attention, when he links gender, the public and private spheres, and 'private property'. I wasn't sure exactly what he's trying to argue with this, and what its relevance to the rest of the essay was, exactly. Is he saying that women are generally associated with the home, and therefore private property? Or is he mistakenly harking back to times when women were actually considered private property? Either way, I felt that this argument was, if not highly generalized, then actually reinforcing of historical gender roles.
The essay as a whole makes some interesting points, and Lyon is right to point out and criticize the massive way in which information is obtained, distributed, and used in modern times. However, he makes some pretty massive blanket statements and assumptions, that I think generally don't hold up and severely weaken his overall argument.
Also, and more specifically, Lyon seems to both point out, and fall into the trap of technological determinism. throughout the piece, he argues that technology is making our interactions more and more abstract, causing 'disappearing bodies'. I wonder if maybe this argument doesn't fall into the same technologically deterministic trap that he warns about earlier, attributing too much agency to technology in our social interactions. Of course, we would all admit that technology has drastically changed the way we interact with each other and the world, but I'm not convinced it goes quite to the point that Lyon argues. What do you all think?
2 comments:
As far for the gender thing and the public and private sphere, I think what Lyon is talking about is not women literally being private property, but being associated with the private sphere and then how that leads in to how things in the private and public sphere are surveilled differently. Sorry, I know that is super vague, but I didn't quite understand that whole part either.
But for the disappearing bodies part, it reminded me of something we studied in a geography class I took last semester. We were discussing how because of increased globalization and better technologies, people in India can work on projects and at call centers that connect them to people working or calling in the United States. My professor (Melissa Feakins) argued that even though the workers physical body was in India the work was being produced in the United States, say for instance, if a worker was working on a computer in India but then the work was copied onto a computer in the United States and stored in the US to be worked on by someone else. In this instance the body doing the actual labor has been unconnected and disappeared from the actual labor that was produced. As for where Lyon comes in, I think he would then say that we can survey this labor that was produced and we can survey the behavior of this person or the work they did or whatever without actually caring about the body or surveying the body. Or on a phone call to a call center. "Your call may be monitored for quality assurance". That call may be surveyed, even leading to a firing of the person working at the call center, without the body ever being monitored in its entirety. Correct me if you don't think that's at all what he was talking about. But I think those are some examples that would fall under his vague terms, as well as many other examples.
Aaron, I was also unsure about his mentioning of gender division in the public/private spheres. His main point in that part of the argument was discussing the blur between the public and private sectors due to increased surveillance, and I didn't feel that his reference to gendered spaces was a very strong argument. It wasn't fleshed out enough to really show how gender's public/private boundaries have become less distinct.
As for technological determinism, Lyon argues that the "major problem of new technologies is their implied determinism." He claims that "technological potential is never social destiny," but we act like it does. These innovations have thus helped produce a new society though it could have been stopped. Instead of us controlling these technologies, they control us. When I read it, I didn't really think he was falling into the trap of technological determinism but was rather just explaining how our society has.
I remember how last semester in one of my classes, my professor asked students to deposit all of their phones/laptops/etc before we took our seats, and everyone felt "naked" and even "incomplete" without them. Some people even became tense at the thought of being away from their precious technological equipment. So I do think that Lyon is right to a degree on how much technology molds our lives. Then again, it could just depend on the person...
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