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Abstract
After considering how surveillance practices discipline the objects of the monitoring gaze, I argue for a focus on the discipline of watching. An era of reflexive skepticism and generalized risk puts a premium on the ability to see through public façades by relying on strategies of detection and verification facilitated by interactive communication technologies that allow users to monitor one another. Interactive communication technologies allow for peer-to-peer surveillance of friends, significant others, and family members. If, in commercial and state contexts, the promise of interactivity serves as a ruse for asymmetrical and nontransparent forms of monitoring, this model of interactivity has also infiltrated the deployment of interactive technologies in personal relationships.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Linda Steiner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments as well as Tim Havens, to whom he is indebted for proposing the distinction between interactivity and interactivities. The author would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Sue Collins's notion of ‘‘disposable celebrity’’ to his discussion of ‘‘flexible celebrity’’.
Notes
1. The percentage of respondents indicating they had sought information online would have been higher—more than 80 percent—if results from Northern Ireland were removed from the data set. The sample from Northern Ireland was too small to make a significant comparison, but it was suggestive: whereas U.S. respondents treated using Google and other forms of information gathering almost as routine practice, almost all of the Irish respondents indicated that they did not use the Internet to find information about people they knew.