Leisure as Surveillance, and the Surveillance of Leisure

Introduction: Leisure in the surveillance society?

This special issue centralizes questions of leisure and “the problem(s)” of surveillance. While some leisure scholarship has focused on surveillance (Jordan & Aitchison, 2008; Rose & Spencer, 2016; Silk, Millington, Rich & Bush, 2016), we believe further attention is warranted, not least because of the incredible permeation and “deep mediatization” (Couldry & Hepp, 2020) of digital leisure in everyday life. This brief introductory article explores how leisure is a crucial node for the ascendance of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and how the experience of leisure itself is changing as a result. While various forms of electronic surveillance have existed since the 1860s (Hochman, 2018), in the last quarter-century, with the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, mobile devices, and various “smart” technologies, the collection, cataloging, and monitoring of our everyday lives have become nearly ubiquitous (Agur & Frisch, 2019; Bauman, Bigo, Esteves, Guild, Jabri, Lyon & Walker, 2014; Crary, 2013; Fasman, 2021; Goodyear, Kerner & Quennerstedt, 2019; Price, 2014). Implications for leisure are numerous.

Once primarily the domain of science-fiction (Lashua, 2018), leisure in the surveillance society has become science-fact. An entire genre of fiction from 1950-1980 focuses on the dangers of surveillance to individual and collective liberty (Lyon, 2018). If not (yet) as insidious as George Orwell’s (1948) vision of an omnipresent, authoritarian “Big Brother” in his dystopian novel, 1984, instead, surveillance has become increasingly nuanced, fluid, and seductive in contemporary society and everyday leisure. This nuance can be seen also in contemporary literature, such as Dave Eggars’ recent novel The Every (2021). In this book, Eggars describes a capitalist system that proliferates through tracking every movement of consumer’s lives. A prescient, if fictionalized, critical social commentary, The Every builds on ideas in Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which argued that most people will trade collective freedoms and individual privacy for a leisure lifestyle of consumer convenience.

A recent feature in The Washington Post (Fowler, 2022) illustrated the growing pervasiveness of surveillance leisure technologies. Documenting in minute detail how the “Amazon Smart Home” tracks its users’ leisure, Fowler concluded: “it’s also a surveillance nightmare. Many of Amazon’s products contribute to its detailed profile of you, helping it know you better than you know yourself.” When so much of contemporary leisure is digitally mediated—from streaming films, television, and music, to e-sports; from mobile media to geospatial fitness apps; and from e-commerce websites such as eBay to Amazon Smart Home products and beyond—surveillance operates through the “datafication” of everyday life and leisure.

The “cookie” is perhaps a significant emblem of datafication in the surveillance society. Most Internet users consent to the collection of their data through the use of cookies, which sound innocuous, but should instead be called “trackers”; on any one website, users often agree to their information being tracked and recorded by corporations and sold to hundreds of marketing and advertising agencies. In this way and others, Crary (2013) argued that people “passively and often voluntarily […] collaborate in [their] own surveillance and datamining” (p. 46). These behaviors, according to Zuboff (2019), reinforce “the genius” of surveillance capitalism by “storm[ing] the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior” (p. 190). Datafication extends across all spheres of life, including leisure, work, and education, leading to concerns not only about surveillance, but also about privacy, freedom, agency, and control.

Scholars have referred to a “culture of surveillance” (Staples, 2013), that centers on the datafication of almost every facet of everyday life. The vast amounts of data that are collected by information technologies have led to new social formations and identities. In this regard, the accumulation of personal information produces what Simon (2002) described as “data doubles” of each person:

the individual is doubled as code, as information, or as simulation such that the reference of the panoptic gaze is no longer the body but its double, and indeed this is no longer a matter of looking but rather one of data analysis. (p. 15)

These body doubles are produced (i.e., “datafied”) through financial records, credit reports, education results, and consumption patterns, and also through web browsing histories, social media and geospatial/mobile data, and other networked digital footprints. As such, datafication also forms part of what have been considered as “societies of control” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 3). In these new formations, people are not only disciplined through (self) surveillance, but by new mechanisms of control. That is, rather than a prison or enclosure in which everyone can be seen, or at least assumes that they can be seen (i.e., Foucault’s panopticism; more below), societies of control operate through seemingly individualized mechanisms, “modulations”, or “a modulating set of practices and relations among social forces” (Elmer 2012, p. 27); this includes the use of networked technologies and the collection of personal data. Leisure can be seen as central to these social formations and modulations, offering “incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own personal information” (Brusseau, 2020, p. 1). In other words, it is important to consider how leisure and pleasure sit at the heart of cultures of surveillance, surveillance societies, and societies of control.

This introductory section has highlighted brief examples of leisure and surveillance in science fiction, and also in the datafication of everyday life. As summarized in further detail below, the papers in this special issue expand and present a wider range of contexts and fuller examples. This introduction also has begun to point toward the need for critical views of leisure and surveillance, as well as engagements with critical ways of conceptualizing and theorizing surveillance. This is where we next turn our attention.

Surveillance: Panopticism to biopolitics to neoliberalism

Surveillance itself is a contested concept, in that it is so nuanced as to require deep inspection, and so ubiquitous as to be assumed as an a priori given in many aspects (both known and unknown) of our lives. Surveillance may be direct, or person-to-person in nature, or it may be technologically mediated, as is increasingly common in contemporary society (Lyon, 2007). An entire journal, Surveillance & Society, is dedicated to the expanding and hybridized issues concerning the watchers and the watched. Within this interdisciplinary field, there is a distinction between acts of surveillance itself, with its technocratic specificities, and a culture of surveillance, which includes the customs, habits, behaviors, perspectives, and epistemologies on the topic that help us understand how surveillance is imagined and experienced (Lyon, 2018). There are both high-tech, and highly organized forms of surveillance and also our quotidian, often mundane experiences and expectations of surveillance, and these may range from casual and careless to hyper focused and intentional. Surveillance, then, is not only something imposed from above and beyond, by often obscured and unclear powerful entities, it is also something in which we engage, both passively and unconsciously, but also actively and acutely aware.

Surveillance may be representative of our condition moving through (post)modernity, in that it is less of a tangible or even comprehensible thing, and more of an all encompassing aspect of daily life. In this way, aptly named “liquid surveillance” connotes an orientation toward developments in surveillance in our fluid and unsettled times (Bauman & Lyon, 2013). Surveillance expands and infiltrates into our lives in often unimaginable ways, both responding to and reproducing this liquidity. Such a perspective or orientation encourages many of us not just to enact and respond to the surveillance that currently is, but also to actively engage with the developing surveillance that is seemingly beneath the surface, and of course also the surveillance that is to come.

Surveillance is often aligned with panopticism, a concept literally meaning “all seeing.” No conversation about surveillance can avoid the panopticon as an actual mechanism for not only surveilling subjects, but also actively to create, reinforce, or otherwise enact particular power dynamics and social hierarchies. In its most literal and material sense, the panopticon is an architecture with a centralized observation tower surrounded by a circle (or other enclosed shape) of observable units. As used in prisons, the panopticon served the purpose of a single guard at the center being able to observe every prison cell, without the inmates knowing whether they were being watched at any given moment. However, when such architectures are extended beyond the material sense, the panopticon becomes a disciplinary concept where techniques of (possible) constant surveillance could alter behaviors, ideas, and discourses, brought to prominence by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. Just the possibility of people being constantly surveilled, Bentham speculated, was sufficient for groups to be positively altered, through benefits in health, industriousness, and morality, among others. These ideas captured the attention of Michel Foucault (1977), who was an outspoken critic of the panopticon’s obvious goal of inducing a state of constant visibility. For Foucault, constant surveillance—or even the idea of constant surveillance—creates regulation and subjugation in people’s everyday lives, becoming another form of discipline administered from above, and from beyond. Foucault (1977) was particularly concerned with the ways in which discipline could be deployed to order and control human complexities, producing what he termed as “docile bodies” (p. 135), highly susceptible to mindlessness and group-think. For Foucault, some of this rise in surveillance was coincidental with the decline of more obvious state-sanctioned physical punishments (i.e., torture, corporal punishment, execution), but was enacted to maintain a more subtle (but nonetheless effective) dominance of the state. The state’s rise in the ability to observe was seen as a permissiveness from the people that has led to any number of contemporary practices of government sanctioned observation and control, all stemming from a metaphor of the panopticon prison.

The technologies of the panopticon, and all of its multitudinous proliferations in contemporary society, only enhance the notion that surveillance is often built into the fabric of our social, cultural, and political lives. Even something as historical and de-technologized as religious confession is a longstanding example of the ease in which people often willingly subject themselves to the observation and critique of a more-powerful other, whether the state, employers, supervisors, community members, or a host of other social agents. State sanctioned surveillance and discipline has given way to corporate sanctioned surveillance and discipline under neoliberalism, but the tendencies toward a near totalizing panopticism remain largely unchecked and insufficiently critiqued or countered.

Foucault’s contribution to critical perspectives of surveillance extends beyond the panopticon itself. For Foucault, the process of surveilling brings with it power relations that are akin to the processes of disciplining, controlling, inspecting, supervising and, potentially, punishing. It is impossible to reckon with surveillance without simultaneously and necessarily reckoning with the power relations that characterize our experiences with surveillance. Foucault’s line of thought concerning surveillance continued in some of his later work, and particularly with the development of biopolitics, or the governance of life of the population. For Foucault, biopolitics could only be conducted in and through processes of neoliberalism, a new and developing relationship between the individual and the state. This fusion of ongoing, power-laden everyday surveillance and the rise of neoliberalism as a defining societal feature brought forth a defining feature of our time, surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism is a subset of capitalist political economy where personal data is observed, captured, and commodified for the core purpose of making profit (Zuboff, 2019). Invoking Marx’s notion of alienation (from the self, from others, from production), surveillance capitalism is characterized by asymmetrical personal data accumulation by companies, organizations, and governments that undertake “unexpected and illegible mechanisms of extraction and control that exile persons from their own behavior” (Zuboff, 2015, p. 85). Subsequently, surveillance capitalism is a significant concern for democratic societies, and a critical threat to justice movements (Cinnamon, 2017).

Foucault, however, would likely note that power relations in society do not so much exist as they flow, and that technologies can be deployed to (also) subvert unjust power relations. As such, it should be noted that surveillance also has power balancing possibilities. Surveillance is often welcomed as a means to achieve a sense of greater security or convenience, and it may be an enjoyable or reassuring possibility offered by systems or devices (Lyon, 2018). With these attributes comes the opportunity to surveil ourselves, and others, in ways that may have been unimaginable outside of science fiction literature only a few years ago. Additionally, the rise of fixed cameras on streets and outside of residences, and the rise of mobile cameras in the pocket of seemingly every person in the world, means that unjust abuses of power, from law enforcement to celebrities, can be recorded and used to hold these abuses to account. For many marginalized people, and particularly racialized minorities, such forms of surveillance, sometimes found in leisure spaces (e.g., public parks), are vital to seeking justice (i.e., Mowatt, 2018). This individualized responsibilization of self-surveillance aligns with our present concerns of the neoliberalization of everyday life (Braedley & Luxton, 2010), including leisure (Rose, 2022). Such self-surveillance is often presented as a necessary tradeoff between security and privacy; but this presentation may be a false dichotomy where both outcomes are possible (Lyon, 2018), although unlikely under surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019).

So what does surveillance look like in contemporary everyday leisure experiences? Even the knowledge of the ubiquity of surveillance presents concerns in leisure contexts, from our online and digital experiences (Silk et al., 2016) to outdoor wilderness experiences (e.g., Lepp et al., 2023) to the violence of everyday law enforcement (e.g., Seigel, 2018). For young people, we are in an age of “dataveillance” (Lupton & Williamson, 2017, p. 780), where the continual monitoring of children leads to their daily activities being watched, judged, and subsequently disciplined (Goodyear et al., 2019). If someone knows or thinks they are being surveilled, it necessarily has a chilling effect on free speech, however broadly “speech” is defined. For many people, including those facing poverty and/or homelessness, their very survival is held hostage to various urban surveillance techniques and practices, from CCTV cameras and spatial monitoring to dynamic laws concerning trespassing and sharing food (Mitchell & Heynen, 2009). Policing, with its rise of robots, drones, cameras, and other technologies is often a coupled combination of publicly funded officers and private security apparatuses, also often indistinguishable from one another (Seigel, 2018).

While it is optimistic to believe that one can largely avoid contemporary surveillance mechanisms and processes through behavioral choices and prudent engagement in society, such beliefs are likely fanciful. Nearly any engagement with a common smartphone in the third decade of the 21^st century not only monitors and surveils the content of the device’s use, but also monitors the user geospatially. A person’s smartphone use, searches, and behaviors might be less influential than the seemingly innocuous fact that the person is in proximity to others who also might be using, searching, and behaving with their smartphones in particular ways, further targeting both commerce and state sanctioned law enforcement toward the (likely) unknowing user, again cementing the logics of neoliberalism into our everyday experiences. Just in the case of the smartphone alone, it might be helpful to ask what contemporary leisure practices take place beyond the meditation of the smartphone. Our quotidian individual behaviors, coupled with governmental structures of willing politicians and rising authoritarianism, make the elevation, exploration, and contestation of these surveillance practices all the more pressing.

Special issue on leisure and surveillance

With these concerns in mind, this special issue asks how leisure is a crucial node for the ascendance of surveillance capitalism, and related, how the experience of leisure itself is changing as a result. Each of the manuscripts in this special issue point to mechanisms of surveillance occurring in and through leisure, serving to both advance our current understanding, and also provoke additional studies that address this developing set of phenomena. Here, we provide a brief overview of the papers in this special issue and some of their contributions to the field.

“The Fatal Coupling of Race, State, and Research on Disparities” is a conceptual paper from Sene-Harper and Outley (2022) that examines if and how researchers contribute to the State surveillance apparatus, and the impact on race relations and disparities in the United States. It further problematizes the negative dynamics of race, surveillance, and state power in leisure. It builds on Mowatt’s (2022) The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us, engaging the work of scholars in critical geography and postcolonial theory to critically discuss surveillance and its function within modern articulations of State power. The authors consider how surveillance capitalism alongside neoliberalization and an increased access to technology have given corporations greater reign and power over information, and enabled the State to exert control and discipline racialized bodies. Further implications on how leisure and leisure research do the work of surveillance leading to geographies of threat are discussed to reorient the normalization of the oppression and surveillance of racialized peoples in leisure.

Cousineau, Kumm-Schaley and Spencer’s (2023) “Surveillance, Capitalism, Leisure, and Data: Being Watched, Giving, Becoming” likewise is a conceptual paper that outlines theories of surveillance for leisure scholars, alongside the discussion of “the leisure body.” The paper summarizes surveillance theories for leisure readers in three broad areas, namely panoptic surveillance, post-panoptic surveillance, and contemporary surveillance. The authors provide ample examples in each of these surveillance techniques in relation to the body, and argue there is an urgent need to resist influences of surveillance apparatuses and surveillance capitalism that bears upon leisure research.

In Dudley and Duffy’s (2023) “Tourism Discourse and Surveillance: Situational Analysis of Post-Katrina New Orleans”, the authors explore post-Katrina tourism redevelopment through the lens of surveillance capitalism. Situational analysis was used to explore how a range of interconnected discourses around safety, security, and identity has shaped and was shaped by the tourism complex. The results highlighted the impacts of the implementation of disaster and surveillance capitalist logic on tourism-related areas. It further unveiled the inequalities invoked by tourism leaders to introduce new development opportunities underpinned by disaster capitalist logic in constructing racial identities that continue to marginalize many residents within the city, favoring instead tourism development and growth. The authors argued tourism and leisure research needs to rethink its predominately managerial lens that aims to harness the rapidly developing technologies for surveillance capitalist outcomes.

In “Conformity and Delinquency: Surveillance, Sport, and Youth in the Charm City”, Mower, Stone, and Wallace (2023) contend that a range of sport and fitness-based programs masquerades as politically-neutral youth outreach as a technology of surveillance aimed at monitoring, controlling, and containing “at-risk” Black youth in Baltimore. The research draws on interviews and newspaper articles to explore how dominant and deficit discourses of Black youths continue to function as extensions of racialized surveillance within a youth “social problems industry”. Despite well-intentioned efforts at youth development, underpinning these programs are the logics of neoliberal entrepreneurialism and reinforcement of meritocratic self-responsibility pedagogies that effectively displace concern of systemic racial injustice and discrimination. The authors concluded that a comprehensive understanding of the nuances of anti-Black racialized surveillance within the contemporary urban sporting assemblage is needed in future leisure research.

Situating leisure in the context of outdoor experiences in Australia, in “An Impossible Job: How Self-Surveillance, Responsibilisation and Personalisation Shape Outdoor Leader Embodiment”, Baker and O’Brien (2023) draw on focus group interviews to examine how outdoor leaders and their managers are both surveilled and governed in their everyday interactions with their clients. Foucauldian notions of surveillance and technologies of the self are used as heuristic tools to guide the analysis on personalization and responsibilization as they weave through institutional relations of power at work. These outdoor leaders were subject to a set of normalized discourses of camp leadership and engaged in panoptic modes of self-surveillance that align with the governance. The authors made visible the unsaid working culture and how the outdoor leaders are subjugated to unethical employment conditions, and they felt compelled to be “always on” and “pushing on” while contending with feelings of self-blame, creating a range of tensions, dangers, and personal costs. It aims to make discourses of outdoor leadership visible that could lead to the designing and re-defining of reasonable and appropriate employment expectations in the outdoor industry.

Finally, in an invited paper, Mowatt’s (2023) “A People’s Future of Leisure Studies: Fear City, Cop City and Other Tales, a Call for Police Research” outlines the need for targeted research on practices of policing in leisure studies. Policing as state sanctioned violence on the lives of Black community members are presented as horrifying outcomes of contemporary relationships between society and law enforcement. Mowatt details the close connections between leisure and policing, highlighting the violence often associated with these interactions, and makes the case that leisure scholars are long overdue in addressing these implicit and explicit interconnections.

As seen in this brief overview of the special issue, surveillance has become a defining, if not explicit, feature of leisure and our daily lives. It governs and informs much of our work, relationships, and consumption, and therefore necessarily colors our leisure experiences as well. As presented in this introduction, and as seen throughout the manuscripts that comprise this special issue, surveillance is so often implemented against the behest of the surveilled for purposes of commodification, deterrence, and/or punishment. With the tremendous resources at play—technological, infrastructural, human, or otherwise—one cannot help but wonder why not use the resources devoted to these types of surveillance activities instead to invest in communities in more open, participatory and democratic ways? Leisure scholars are well positioned to lead on this ongoing and increasingly relevant discussion.