Page 519 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Surve llance and Pr vacy

those who exercise it, as, for example, in the case of attempts by the FBI to use
information about the private lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon
for political manipulation and blackmail. But even when surveillance power is
not deliberately abused, as long as it is backed up by the threat of force, it serves
as a form of social control, fostering conformity with the rules set by those who
exercise it (Foucault 1977).

CommErCiaL survEiLLanCE

Although private companies do not have armies to impose their will on the
populace, their ability to use information about consumers to make decisions
about whether to provide them with access to goods and services might still be
considered a form of power. Marketers gather information about consumers to
determine ways to target them more effectively, and in so doing may help rein-
force economic and informational barriers experienced by underprivileged or
minority populations (Gandy 2001). In the future, as data gathering becomes
more invasive and marketing more sophisticated, we may have to worry about
advertisers finding ways to target us at moments when we are most vulnerable,
impressionable, or insecure. The ability, for example, to determine when consum-
ers are most likely to make an impulse purchase based on data about their past
behavior or even their vital signs might be considered a form of surveillance-
based power.
At the same time, surveillance-based entertainment has proven to be an effec-
tive way for media outlets to produce inexpensive content. The reality TV genre
not only markets voyeurism as a form of entertainment, it puts a game-show face
on the post–Cold War specter of Big Brother, portraying willing submission to
monitoring as a form of self-expression, therapy, and democratization of celeb-
rity culture. Surveillance, such shows imply, can be good fun and good for us.

PrivaCy
Many of the concerns over the use and abuse of surveillance center upon
the threat it may pose to privacy, the right to which, although not written into
the U.S. Constitution, is generally considered to be a core attribute of a liberal
democratic society. Privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen, among others, has argued that
privacy plays a crucial rule, paradoxically, in providing the distance necessary to
maintain personal, political, and professional relationships. Not only are there
spheres of our private lives over which we wish to maintain control, but our
acceptance of the social roles of others relies on particular aspects of their lives
remaining private. Our ability to interact with some individuals as employers,
others as family members, and still others as teachers or students depends on
the ability of all concerned to selectively disclose information about ourselves—
to retain some sense of control over which aspects of our lives are available to
whom. Consequently, the threat posed by surveillance is not simply the prospect
of abuse—that state or commercial agencies might use information gathered
about individuals for illegitimate purposes—but of a loss of autonomy.