Surveillance Society in a Digitalized World

Although the surveillance society discussions have been carried out for a long time, they have recently moved to a different stage with the increase of digitalization. There is a new situation that changes the entire historical context of surveillance, and this new situation is briefly called digital surveillance. However, to make sense of digitalization and digital surveillance, it is necessary to explain how digital citizenship contributes to this process. Digitalization without digital citizenship is unthinkable. In short, this study will show the continuities and breaks of the phenomenon of surveillance in the historical process by shifting from classic surveillance practices to digital surveillance forms. Digital surveillance is considered to be much more complex, sophisticated, incomprehensible to all, and transcends all kinds of time and space boundaries compared to classic surveillance.

New Agoraphobia: Reclaiming Controllability in a Society of Total Surveillance

<p>Increasingly ubiquitous forms of surveillance networks and methods are becoming commonplace in today’s societies. While their application is rational and for the most part beneficial their presence effects the perception of space, eroding margins of privacy, increasing pressure on public space, and in some cases perpetuating unjustifiable feelings of persecution and mental unrest. These consequences reduce individual control over one’s environment and furthermore represent an instance of a type of space itself creating anxieties, similarly to the onset of agoraphobia in the 1860’s. Applying a tripartite design approach of three different scales to a hypothetical scenario of an escalated total surveillance society in an urban setting leads to an exploration of physical space and the spatialisations of power and emotion in the issues of overexposure, crowding, and loss of control. Through the resulting designs it is demonstrated how an informed application of thresholds, materiality, and physically reconfigurable environments in built form can allow for instances of relief and grounding, the gesture such a relief provides itself also embodies intent and reaction, furthering the physical with a symbolic and psychosocial response.</p>

New Agoraphobia: Reclaiming Controllability in a Society of Total Surveillance

<p>Increasingly ubiquitous forms of surveillance networks and methods are becoming commonplace in today’s societies. While their application is rational and for the most part beneficial their presence effects the perception of space, eroding margins of privacy, increasing pressure on public space, and in some cases perpetuating unjustifiable feelings of persecution and mental unrest. These consequences reduce individual control over one’s environment and furthermore represent an instance of a type of space itself creating anxieties, similarly to the onset of agoraphobia in the 1860’s. Applying a tripartite design approach of three different scales to a hypothetical scenario of an escalated total surveillance society in an urban setting leads to an exploration of physical space and the spatialisations of power and emotion in the issues of overexposure, crowding, and loss of control. Through the resulting designs it is demonstrated how an informed application of thresholds, materiality, and physically reconfigurable environments in built form can allow for instances of relief and grounding, the gesture such a relief provides itself also embodies intent and reaction, furthering the physical with a symbolic and psychosocial response.</p>

How Do People View Various Kinds of Smart City Services? Focus on the Acquisition of Personal Information

In smart city services, large volumes of personal information are generally captured, and urban development is based on that data. However, people do not always have accepting attitudes toward smart city services. The purpose of this study was to identify the expectations and anxieties that people have toward five typical services in smart cities (social credit, artificial intelligence (AI) cameras, health information, garbage collection, and automatic vehicles) by using mainly open-ended questions. An online survey was conducted with Japanese participants by presenting them with one of the five vignettes about the services described above. The results showed that the participants’ expectations from each service were distinctly different between the vignettes. Anxieties about the leakage of personal information were found for the vignettes of social credit and health information. For the vignettes of AI cameras and garbage collection, anxieties that privacy would not be sufficiently ensured and that people would be involved in a surveillance society were noted. Additionally, the participants tended to exhibit lower accepting attitudes toward services considered to capture a large amount of personal information. We believe that our findings are meaningful to operators leading smart city projects and researchers in urban planning and psychology.

Predictive Policing

This chapter addresses predictive policing, which is a term that refers to a range of crime-fighting approaches that use crime mapping data and analysis, and, more recently, social network analysis, big data, and predictive algorithms. The rise of predictive policing, especially in many police jurisdictions in large cities in the USA, has raised the spectre of the surveillance society in which citizens can be arrested by police for crimes they have not yet committed on the basis of evidence that they will commit them. Speaking generally, predictive policing faces several problems. Some of these are problems for predictive policing even in its own terms of contributing to crime reduction. Others are moral problems, about whether predictive policing violates moral rights or is unjust. These two types of problems are interconnected. Ultimately, the expanding use of biometric facial recognition databases and other emerging technologies in law enforcement as part of predictive policing should be clearly and demonstrably justified in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in the service of specific law enforcement purposes rather than by general appeals to community security or safety. Moreover, it should comply with moral principles constitutive of liberal democracy, such as the principle that individuals have a moral right to freedom from state interference absent prior evidence of violation of its laws.

Confronting Agamben on the Pandemic: Biopolitics, Class Struggle and Surveillance Capitalism

This paper evaluates Agamben’s observations on the COVID-19 crisis and its consequent crises that seek to revisit issues of the security state. Through this paper, I attempt to probe the contentious relationship between capitalism and human freedom, biological life and its politicisation thereof without taking recourse to the idiom of biopolitics. I seek to enumerate the ways in which Marxist postulates such as ‘class struggle’ and the ‘internal contradiction of capitalism’ are indispensable frames to think along while addressing the concerns of an anticipatory surveillance society by demonstrating the problems and limits of displacing immanent dialectics of antagonisms of class struggle with Agamben’s immanent sovereign logic of reproduction of biopolitics.

Measures Against the Pandemic as the Panoptical Eye of the Power: The Example of Coronavirus Pandemic

Epidemics threatened the daily life activities of human societies in certain periods of history. Epidemic diseases, known as disasters that resulted in the death of millions of people, have always been issues that occupy humanity, to be detected from the moment they emerged and to seek solutions to end the epidemic. Having knowledge means having power. Therefore, the easiest way to retain information is through surveillance. Considering the history of epidemic diseases, it is seen that surveillance practices are frequently used. In the information society that emerged with new communication technologies, it is seen that individuals voluntarily participate in surveillance and the walls of the prison have changed by demolishing. Covid-19, which rapidly increased in coronavirus cases and turned into a global epidemic, is known to increase the use of surveillance practices by all states globally to control the epidemic. Fear of the epidemic in societies has become considerable than the privacy of personal data, and their voluntary participation in these practices has been a matter of concern. This consent-based process brings with it criticisms of legitimizing the surveillance society, which has been at the center of discussions since the past. Surveillance played an important role in the rise of totalitarian regimes. The legitimacy of a supervised social structure will accelerate the rise of totalitarian regimes, depriving people of living in an unlimited but self- controlled prison.