Get a Master's in Surveillance

City University London now offers an MA in Surveillance Studies, starting this semester.

Random Quote

This wasn't a meme or anything. I was dusting and randomly pulled off the shelf Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (which I've never read; I'm not a big Dreiser fan), opened to a random page and was drawn to this paragraph:

People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
p. 115, Signet edition, (1961)

Books/Reading

Stack of last minute, late summer reading (less than 2 weeks before school starts).

Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. Hill & Wang, 2009. Just about done with this. Whereas Clark (below) still, in the end, separates consciousness from the world, Noe does not. Noe: "Notably, neither Clark not Chalmers has sympathy for the idea developed here that consciousness itself can be explained only if we make use of such an extended conception of the machinery of the mind" (p. 196)

Andy Clark, Supersizing the Miind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford, 2008.

Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The erosion of attention and the coming dark age. Prometheus Books, 2008. Got this last summer, but finally sitting down to work my way through it. It really brings in a broad range of research.

Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The Penguin Press (2009).
Somewhat disappointed in this; it's more "lite" than Gallagher (which is more densely researched). Though as an argument for the need to pay attention in life, especially to others in one's life, to meditate, &c. it's a useful book.

Hal Niedzviecki, The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. CityLights Books. Just starting on it; it seems a fun read. (Thanks to Greg S for the recommendation)

And I've been lapped by Thomas Pynchon. His latest, Inherent Vice, is on the bedside table. Just six pages, in, but it's reading fast and seems lots of fun. Meanwhile, I'm still only on p. 322 of his last one, Against the Day, which I really like, but don't get great swaths of time to read. 763 pages to go (and the font's a couple points smaller than Inherent Vice, too)!

Still haven't cracked Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and am just over halfway through Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, which doesn't quite have the spark of the earlier ones in the series. Every few months I pick it up and read a couple of chapters.

Peeping Tom

Just finished watching Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). I’ve noticed that the film is often mentioned as an early and influential film regarding voyeurism and surveillance. However, I haven’t seen it discussed much in the surveillance literature beyond the fact that it’s about a disturbed individual who stalks women with a specially prepared camera with a knife in the tripod leg so he can film them as they die. The film is obviously quite Freudian (in fact, the writer and director had initially wanted to do a film about Freudian thought, but someone else was doing it so they did this instead). Mark, the filmmaker who is the murderer, was abused by his father, a psychiatrist who was studying fear and using his son as a case study by terrorizing him and coldly watching his reactions. But not only is he watching his son’s reactions, he is filming them. Indeed, Mark is subject as a young boy to constant surveillance. He says he was filmed constantly, even while he slept, and his entire house was wired for sound. In this way the film plays an interesting articulations between obsessive voyeurism (of the father) and the scientific gaze. These traits are passed down to Mark: his father gives him a camera of his own, another psychiatrist tells the grown up Mark that he has his father’s eyes, and Mark now controls his father’s house and his father’s instruments. What makes this really creepy is that Mark’s father is played in the old films that Mark shows by the director, Michael Powell, and the young Mark is played by Powell’s real son, and in the scene where child Mark is shown by the corpse of his mother—that’s his real mother (Powell’s wife) on the bed (presumably alive).

The commentary track on the Criterion DVD is by none other than Laura Mulvey. If you want a master class in psychoanalytic film criticism, watch the film with this commentary. There’s also a documentary on the writer, Leo Marks, which connects the film with the bookstore at 24 Charing Cross Road and WWII cryptography.

The film was incredibly controversial, universally panned by critics, who were shocked by its content. Carl Boehm, who plays Mark, comments in the accompanying documentary that after the press screening no one would even look he or Powell in the eye as they left the theater. The film was pulled from theaters after a week and promptly forgotten; Powell’s career ended. Apparently we know of the film today because Martin Scorsese discovered it and championed it in the 1970s as a masterpiece. Since the film is really about being a filmmaker (voyeurism and sadism and the camera), it’s an interesting self-reflexive exercise that unnerves the audience (and perhaps the early critics). It implicates us, the audience, in the voyeurism more directly than even a slasher film since it is self aware (this film keeps reminding us that we’re watching a film, since it makes us watch films in the film). The content of the film was also shocking for the time: the first shot of the film is of a prostitute being stalked by the killer; and from the underground pornography sold at the newsagents to the first shot of nudity in a mainstream British film its content pushes boundaries. The fact that we may feel sorry for this tortured man is also controversial.

Alfred Hitchcock (with whom Powell worked at one point) refused to do a critic’s screening for Psycho (which premiered a few months after Peeping Tom) because of what they had done to Powell’s film. Hitchcock thought his film was much more shocking. [This was mentioned in some of the supplemental material]

Ebert's got a discussion of the film here

Scorsese writes about the film here

CCTV at home

Newest intervention into "problem families": put CCTV in the home to make sure everyone behaves! This isn't control society stuff, this is simply the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms Foucault talked about. If you're a "problem" ("the worst families in England"; the Daily Mail calls them "Yobbish families"), now the State will tell you how to behave and watch you so you learn. They're calling the set up "sin bins." The papers like the Orwellian metaphor (The State placing cameras in the home; in England) though Big Brother watched everyone. This is discipline, pure and simple: render visible, document, differentiate.

How I wish this were April 1.

Sigh

Got the link from WIRED via Huffington Post originally.

Summer Heat

This is what happens when one leaves unopened soda cans in a car in the sun when the outside temperature reaches close to 115 degrees F. One can literally blew its top (kinda messy). All the others in the case are distended like the other one pictured here.

Hmmmm... do you think these are still drinkable?

Bookstores

I was reading Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print and came across a passage where he writes, “This discovery helps to explain the motivation behind the aggressive campaign by Waldenbooks in the late 1980s to bring its warehouses and 1,000 plus retail stores online…” (100).

Working, as I was, at a Waldenbooks (Summer and Fall 1988 in San Antonio), it made me reflect on the changes I was seeing in our little mall store at the time. This was the year between my undergraduate degree and starting grad school, when I was actually shopping for grad schools. I had just been to ICA in New Orleans to meet Larry (and James and a number of other folks) to talk about Illinois (and to talk about Wisconsin with Fiske). Anyway, I worked full time at a Waldenbooks in a mall in San Antonio. I liked the store because the manager had customized the stock a bit—we actually had copies of Foucault and other critical theorists on our shelves, and other more esoteric volumes tucked in with the usual wares. We were not computerized in those days. We hand entered ISBN’s, I think, into the register. Then we actually got our first scanner so that we could scan bar codes (and spent too much time playing with it). To look up something for a customer meant pulling out microfiches from Ingram or Baker and Taylor to see if they had things.

At some point in my six-month tenure at the bookstore (around Thanksgiving I quit and went to work for a small mail order company, Haverstick and Ballyk, selling classical CDs) we started getting inventory lists from the main office. These were lists of what we were to have on our shelves and we had to go through and pull anything not on it (bye bye Foucault). I got the sense that our store manager was getting increasingly frustrated by the controlling nature of the corporation (trying to rebel at one point by shelving an entire display of a new bestseller, dictated by the corporation, upside down--the Assistant Managers put them right). Anyway, the store became much less interesting after the purge.

One of the things that Waldenbooks did was run a deep discount of all New York Times bestsellers. What surprised me is that the company seemed to know what a bestseller was before a book was even released. So that the new Ludlum (for example) was discounted right out of the box even though, technically, it hadn’t been sold and couldn’t therefore be a bestseller.

Surveillance and TV

Forgot the list of TV shows about surveillance.
I should note that I'm looking for fiction (which eliminates documentary, reality TV, etc.)

The Prisoner
The Wire
The Last Enemy

Surveillance Films

I'm compiling a necessarily incomplete list of films about surveillance. That is, films which are primarily about surveillance, where surveillance is a key element of the film, the atmosphere of the film, or plot of the film, not just films with shots of people watching each other, or occasional images of CCTV cameras. Potentially this is quite a large genre if we include police procedurals and spy films where surveillance is a matter of course. But are there specific films which seem to reflect on the act of surveillance?

I haven't categorized them, just put them alphabetically. I've included a very short list of TV programs about surveillance as well, though I'm primarily concerned about film.

Additions to the list (or objections for the inclusion of certain films on the list, I haven't watched them all) most welcome.


1984 (1956)
1984 (1984)
Blowout
Blowup
Blue Thunder
Body Double
Bourne Identity (&c)
Brazil
Cache
Code 46
The Conversation
Deathwatch
Deja Vu
The Departed
Disturbia
The End of Violence
Enemy of the State
Final Cut
Gattaca
The Good Shepherd
Hackers
The Handmaid’s Tale
Hi, Mom!
The Lives of Others
Look
Minority Report
The Net
The Net 2.0
Oceans 11
One Hour Photo
Panic Room
Peeping Tom
Rear Window
Red Road
Der Reise
Sliver
Sneakers
Stakeout (& Stakeout 2)
Surveillance (2008)
Surveillance 24/7
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
THX 1138
Timecode
The Truman Show
V For Vendetta
Winter Kills

Tinkerbell

Introducing Tinkerbell, the newest family member. She's a 2-year old Poodle/Poodle-mix. Very mellow.

So Long Analog

The last day of analog TV in the US.
This set still works after 50 years*, but as of tomorrow we'll need a digital converter box (which I'm half tempted to get for it, just because).



*(OK, I think we busted a tube last time we moved it and the sound's out, but the rest still works),

limiting Backscatter

From Epic.Org. For more on this story, see their website.:

=======================================================================
[1] House Approves Bill Limiting Whole-Body Imaging at Airports
=======================================================================
The House approved an amendment bill that will limit the use of Whole-
Body Imaging machines in US airports. The Transportation Security
Administration had earlier decided to replace the walkthrough metal
detectors at airports with whole body imaging devices. These devices
enable a virtual strip search that produces detailed naked images of
individuals, including females and young children. The technology
provides little additional security beyond other screening techniques,
including magnetometers, physical examination, and baggage inspection.

The amendment, put forward by Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), aims
to establish limitations on the use of this invasive technology for
aircraft passenger screening. The bill prohibits the use of these
devices as the sole or primary method of screening aircraft passengers,
unless another method of screening, such as metal detection,
demonstrated cause for preventing such passenger from boarding an
aircraft.

Pollution

This is absolutely devastating. Pollution piling up amongst the world's poor. The second link is to a gallery of discarded computer waste (which is highly toxic).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2009/jun/05/waste-world-environment-day?picture=348339024

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2008/may/06/computer.waste?picture=333898276

"Look"

Adam Rifkin’s 2007 film Look is the latest in a long line of films that take surveillance as their central theme. I wish it were a more distinguished entry into this category, but films about surveillance often cross over from criticism to exploitation.

This is a film with actually little pretension to a message, just a general statement that there are surveillance cameras everywhere and we have no privacy (especially it seems in our most private moments of vulnerability or anguish). There is a vague gesture towards the fact that cameras can be both positive and negative, but this is not pursued in any depth. If it were attempting to be a more serious message picture, there would be more serious issues with it. As it is, I think it uses the issue of privacy and surveillance as a simply a conceit, a hook to bring in an audience to watch this sensationalist fare. It plays like a compilation of FOX surveillance camera TV specials except with better quality footage and without the pixellations.

Look is a film about disparate lives in Los Angeles, all of whom interconnect at some point, at theme that has been much better done by other films. The unique angle here is that the movie is filmed as if it were captured entirely by CCTV cameras—if CCTV cameras were all high def and had sound (and having a microphone on a CCTV camera is actually illegal in places—capture an image, but not sound too). Of course, this (a film based exclusively on CCTV footage) was done back in the 1980s with Der Reise, but no matter.

The film certainly has critical promise in that we are made to identify with the cameras (we certainly don’t identify with these caricatures of characters) and participate in the violation of privacy, the voyeurism. That discomfort of being made to watch could be turned to social critique (how can this happen? What can be done to protect us?). But this is not the case here. The violation is made entertaining. Let me give you an example. The opening scenario is of a scene that represents one of the more disturbing invasions of privacy: a young woman changing clothes in a mall department store fitting room being recorded without her knowledge. Though this makes one feel immediately uncomfortable, something else happens here. As she strips down to a thong, she begins posing in front of the mirror, to be joined by a friend who also strips down. They start engaging in a teasing play, bumping and grinding in front of the mirror. It reminded me of a point John Berger made a number of years ago about the history of the nude in oil painting. One of the themes of nudes in oil painting was Vanity. There would be a picture of a nude woman, but she would be shown admiring herself in the mirror. This would ostensibly give the painting some moral purpose as a critique of character, while it’s real purpose would be to give the wealthy owner of the painting a nude woman to look at. It’s OK to look at her because she is already looking at herself (and besides, she secretly wants to be looked at). The painting would present a nude woman and then critique HER for her moral failings (as vain). Since the girls are performing for the mirror themselves, they obviously want to be looked at. This all makes our voyeuristic invasion OK. It distracts us from the point that we are invading their privacy. The film seeks to make this scene familiar, safe, and titillating, comfortable for fans of teen sexploitation films. In the end the scene leaves me feeling disturbed but not that I have been made complicit in violating the privacy and dignity of a vulnerable individual, but that somehow I’m watching this adolescent misogynist junk.

And the film proceeds from there.

New Blogs

I've started a couple of sidelines in the blogosphere (further diluting my readership, no doubt). One is a blog entitled, "Cultural Globalization" which will be a series of short, informal reflections on issues and ideas arising from my last book, Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide, a continuation of the discussions in that book. Unfortunately, Blogger has tagged the blog as a Spam Blog and have slapped some weird warning on it. I'm working to have this taken down.


The second, "The Clickable World" will be a space for ongoing notes on my next research project regarding everyday life and interactive mobile media. There have been scattered reflections on "Ain't Got Time to Blog" on this project; the new blog is just to focus these more. I'll post some earlier parts of this there too (like the link to the paper I presented in Korea). Right now there's nothing there, but check back later. It's nighttime in the clickable world. :)

Me, in the paper

Missed when this actually hit newsprint (assuming it did), but there's a series of quotes from me towards the end of this column in the Arizona Republic. Of course, if the inverted pyramid structure of newspaper writing holds true, the stuff at the bottom is that which is least essential and most easily cut :)

New in Surveillance

First, apparently the NSA has been spying on Americans beyond the already lax boundaries set up by the Bush administration. Is anyone surprised?

Anyone?

Anyone?

And these oversteps included plans to wiretap (without a warrant) a member of Congress. To quote from the New York Times:

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

One would think such a plan would merit more than "concerns."


Second, apparently it is now illegal (or if not officialy illegal, greatly discouraged) to take pictures of anything having to do with public transportation in England, as an Austrian tourist found out.

Roller Coaster and Clazziquai

Roller Coaster is an acid pop group from South Korea. I've got several of their CD's, and just ran across this video on YouTube. Love this song.

Check out Clazziquai Project while you're at it. Or this video from them.

thought for the day

It seems that the only place in North America (at least) that we publicly debate (or at least engage) issues of technology, responsibility, and humanity (apart from the odd lecture hall here or there) is in popular science fiction films and television shows.

Backscatter to become the default?

From the most recent EPIC alert: apparently the TSA is planning on making Backscatter X-Rays the default security screen at airports rather than metal detectors.

Lots of links off of the EPIC page.