The Work of Being Watched - Mark Andrejevic

THE WORK OF BEING WATCHED - MARK ANDREJEVIC
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Consumers are invited to subject themselves to forms of interactivity that monitor their behavior with the promise that this interactivity offers an outlet for creative self-expression

The promise deployed by reality-tv is that submission to comprehensive surveillance is not merely a character-building challenge and a ‘growth’ experience , but a way to participate in a medium that has long relegated audience members to the role of passive spectators

Submission

Access to the real

Spectators shall become participants

Power will be shared with people

More Escapist entertainment than immersion in brute reality

The internet allows people like her to become content producers, rather than remaining merely media consumers. In so doing, it ostensibly offers them the ability to control the product of their creative labor

When the medium is no longer a mass medium, the mass itself is dissolved into an active body of participants

this ability of real people – those who are not officially part of the entertainment industry – to participate in a realm from which they have been excluded is offered, at least in part, as compensation to the public for allowing themselves to be watched

the more details we divulge about our shopping and viewing habits, our lifestyle and even our movements during the day, the more we can have goods and services crafted to meet our individual needs.

Anyone can perform the work of being watched

Exploitative

Largely driven by technology

Technological developments succeed where political struggle has failed

In a networked society, the real power shift is from the producer to the consumer, and there is a distribution of controls and power. On the web, Karl Marx’s dream has been realized: the tools and the means of production are in the hands of the workers

Equal opportunity to participate

Despite the promise of unmediated access to the real, viewers are, according to this account, presented with yet another highly produced product of the culture industry.

Illusion of authenticity

Only the exceptional movement versions of reality TV, which rely on found footage like commercial surveillance tape and homemade video, embrace gritty production values.

(thematization of the apparatus of manipulation in many reality formats)

in the social symbolic reality, things ultimately are what they pretend to be

reality TV highlights the reality of artifice in the mass media. To the extent that it deploys the work of being watched as a means of generating content, it accurately reflects the emerging reality of the interactive economy

deception of means of the truth

why is reality tv pretending that its real, so that we may cannily believe its phony, when it accurately portrays the reality of contrivance (giving a sense of artificially) in contemporary society

increasing importance not just of surveillance but of interactive technologies that rearrange the conventional distinctions between work and play and between consumption and production

the aspect of reality programming that is truly real, is not a contrived and sensational aspect that gains the most attention in the media coverage, but the way in which it anticipates real societal changes.

Reality programming and new media interactivity. Just as the former is promoted as an alternative to the hackneyed and predictable storylines of fictional entertainment, so the latter ostensibly provides an alternative to the uniformity of mass society. In both cases, getting real implies a critical engagement with the legacy of mass society.

The promise of interactivity must be located in relation to the history it offers to surpass

Whatever. They know.

An invitation to productive self-disclosure

Furthermore, she attracted her millions of fans in two ways – first, by taking on the active role of producer rather than the passive one of the viewer, and by similary encouraging her audience to talk back via online chats; second, by providing them with a steady diet of ‘reality’ in place of the predigested news and entertainment programming that are the staple formats of the mass media

Dotcomguy’s attempt to enlist the webcam as an advertising gimmick

Quarter million people around the world have taken to ‘exposing their lives part time’ and noted that a million webcams were sold in 1999 alone

What if people beamed wearcomp video to the web, offering continuous views of breaking events that hitherto have been available only from newscorp,Aol-time, warner and Disney? Would it be possible to turn the table on the surveillance society and encounter the media monopolies? What would be the effect on public opinion if thousands of wearcomp-equipped citizens webcast all they saw and heard?

Access to the means of media production promises to empower the people

Multitasking while watching and participating

The computer thus served as a dual role for viewers: it allowed them to monitor the big brother house, but it also allowed aol to monitor online interest in the show by recording visits to the webpage and incorporating comments posted online into the broadcast version. Thus, the big brother format offers multiple opportunities to explore the integrated elements of spatial enclosure interactivity, and the work of being watched

The mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature of the mass of merely existing reality

Reality-based films that record the rhythms of daily life were, as documentary filmmakers lisa barbash and Lucien taylor argue, one of the first manifestations of the moving picture medium.

The vast majority of the content is devoted to the routine details of daily existence

The medium served as a means of overcoming spatial and temporal boundaries, re-creating either historically or geographically distant lives

Proximal, contemporary figures as representatives of typical – hence real – people

How does the artifice of filmmmaking impact the ‘reality’ of what it seeks to portray?

The conditions might have been artificial, but the responses were real

Validity

Most people who step forward into the television limelight and attempt to gain national visibility become too visible, too exposed, and are thereby demystified. The more we see them, the more ordinary they appear

a similar demystifying intimacy helped undermine the cultural authority (if not the economic and political power) of elite groups and individuals: we have the perspective of stagehands who are aware of the constructed nature of the drama….

Rather than being fooled, we are willingly entertained, charmed, courted, seduced. Ironically, all the recent discussions of how we are being manipulated may only point out how relatively visible and exposed the machinations now are.

[The historical moment – marked by the role of television in the ostensibly democratic demystification of authority and the advent of the first reality show based on the daily lives of real people, corresponds to the return of an era of increasing economic inequality]

[ the deployment of the offer of shared control becomes more ideologically important at a time when real control over economic resources is becoming increasingly concentrated. At the same time, increasing stratification requires more comprehensive forms of marketplace monitoring in order to rationalize the production and marketing processes for an ever wider range of goods for a more segmented market]

[the offer of participation both compensates (symbolically) for growing inequality and serves as an inducement to submit to the forms of interactive monitoring relied on by producers to reduce uncertainty in an increasingly diversified market]

reality-tv is, in many of its incarnations, a lottery of celebrity

‘return of the real’ aligns itself with the formal challenge to the authenticity of the visual image itself; it is also easier to manipulate the images that are captured

what seems lost is not only a belief in the evidential powers of photography, but as much a sense of being in contact with the world by way of indexicality

the emergence of total surveillance as a means of capturing reality and the virtualization of reality go hand in hand

in formal terms the revitalization of the visual medium promised by reality TV requires the rehabilitation of indexicality and, with it, the dense substantiality of the real. This is the promise of shows that offer to revitalize fictional formats by injecting them with elements of the real.

Observational roles let the spectators put the pieces together for themselves: they proceed by implication rather than demonstration, ad so demand a more active viewing experience

Rather than emphasizing the sensationalized aspect of reality, webcams, from their inception, focused on the mundane character of daily life – an element that had been neglected by the increasing sensationilizaton of both news and entertainment. In this respect, personal webcams anticipate the role of surveillance in the online economy

The camera appeal to a drive for transparency: the desire to see, thanks to technology, what would otherwise remain hidden from view. The goal of transparency aligns itself with the challenge to the abstracted relations of mass society that leave so much hidden sight, including the sites of media, political, and industrial production

A fully documented life

Wallet pc

The spaces we move within not only respond to us but also generate a detailed record of our movements, our actions, perhaps even our vital functions

The ultimate data double

The real economic value of the documented life relies on the tried-and-true panoptic model: the few (marketers, adervtisers, and dataminers) monitoring the many

Those, in other words, who control the means and mode of surveillance – not those being watched

Wearable computing

Synocoptic surveillance: they rely on the rationalization of the work of being watched rather than on the democratization of access to the means of media production

Contemporary critique of online surveillance , which tends to pit convenience against personal privacy

Privacy grows from the same modern soil as surveillance, which is another reason for doubting its efficacy as a tool of counter-surveillance

The operative question is not wether a particular conception of privacy has been violated but rather, what are the relations that underwrite entry into a relationship of surveillance, and who profits from the work of being watched

The information revolution as matter of differential (and equal) access to, and control over, information resources

Surveillance serves as a means of controlling and disciplining the institutionalized populations

Stresses the role of panopticonism in sorting consumers into classes and categoriesm thereby consolidating power gains of bureaucracies, both private and public at the expense of individuals and the nonorganized sectors of society

Seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than technical and positive

Invasion of privacy and the oppressive surveillance capacity of the state. In short, the emphasis is on the ways in which disciplinary surveillance creates ‘docile bodies’ and not on the more suggestive aspect of faucaults analysis: the spiraling cycle of productivity incited by disciplanry regimes

Sophisticated information and communication technologies to render the scientific management of consumer life more efficient and automatic – and, ofcourse, cost-effective

Being watched is a vital component of the traditional modern workplace

The internet anticipates a world in which the mass media model is inverted: many people are watched by the few, who compile, sort, and aggregate information about consumers in order to design ways of rationalizing the consumption process. In short, it envisions a world in which interactive media allow for the organization of leiseure/consumption activity precisely along the lines previously limited to work

Perpetual surveillance is to be welcomed as a means of confronting and challenging one’s own beliefs and actions rhater than feared as a form of social control

Voluntary submission to comprehensive surveillance becomes a therapeutic experience

Voyeurism is an undeniable aspect of the appeal of reality tv and lends this appeal a distinct erotic charge

Pornography carries with it the promise of the real: that the act of copultion is neither imitated, as in fictional movies, nor stylizied, as in erotica, but presented in all its raw, mundane, reality

Whatever I’m doing, it has nothing to do with me – it has to do with what they’re thinking I am , and, that is what they are

The panopticon has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and effective, it does so not for the power itself. Its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, to increase and multiply.