Communication Research and the Study of Surveillance

Abstract

This paper outlines some of the productive points of intersection between communications research and the study of surveillance. It highlights some of the contributions that the field of communications has made to the emerging interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies, and suggests some possible lines of research in the areas of consumer surveillance and interactive media, police communications and surveillance, closed-circuit television, media representations of surveillance, surveillance and the ritual model of communication, and surveillance and social inequality. The unique contributions made by the authors included in this special issue are also noted. It is by no means an exhaustive overview.

Notes

1. As Dan Schiller (2007) has noted, in its bid for legitimacy at the outset of the Cold War, communication studies incorporated the growing, all-inclusive paradigm of information theory, shifting its emphasis away from mass persuasion and propaganda toward “abstract, formalized discussions of information senders, receivers, and channels” (p. 18).

2. See, especially, the respective work of John Tagg (1987) and Alan Sekula (1986), and the volume Documenting Individual Identity, edited by Jane Caplan and John Torpey (2001).

3. Important work followed, including Kenneth Laudon (1986) and Gary Marx (1988).

4. In a study of police use of information technologies published in 1992, Peter Manning specifically does not include “a host of means of enhancing the primary data-gathering capacity of the police such as surveillance devices, miniaturized tape recording and transmitting machines, drug and alcohol testing kits, video cameras for recording traffic stops, and more systematic tools for crime-scene analysis and data storage and retrieval” (p. 351). His study was narrowly concerned with information processing within police organizations and the impact of IT on police organizational communications. Although he does not explicitly address it as such, the study was more closely related to workplace surveillance research—and Richard Maxwell's (2005) work on the labor of surveillance—than to the literature on police surveillance of the social. The subfield of organizational communication has much to offer the study of workplace surveillance.

5. For examples of research on the effectiveness of CCTV schemes for crime prevention and reduction, see the contributions in Part Four of Norris, Moran, and Armstrong (Eds.) (1998).

6. For a wide variety of different theoretical and methodological approaches to CCTV, see the special issue of Surveillance and Society on the topic (2/3), available online at http:www/surveillance-and-society.org/cctv.htm.

7. Gary Marx (1996) was one of the first to consider media representations of surveillance as an object of theoretical interest.

8. Mathiesen (1997) uses the term “synopticism” to refer to the role of the mass media, and especially television, in enabling the many to watch the few, in contrast to panopticism.

9. See Sullivan (2007 August 14).

10. Communications scholarship on the relationship between social context and the development of new technologies often focuses on the discursive dimensions of technological innovation and has not been limited to the study of social inequalities. For example, see David Phillips' (2004) analysis of the way that particular conceptualizations of privacy help to shape the development of privacy enhancing technologies or PETs.

Robertson, C. (2004). “Passport please”: The U.S. passport and the documentation of individual identity, 1845–1930. PhD dissertation, Institute of Communications Research, Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.