David Perry’s Ubiquitous Surveillance, unlike many of the posts on the blog so far, did not leave me with a general distaste or abhorrent sense of paranoia. Whether that is because I am a normally paranoid individual or because I reason that my information is out for people to see, and that while I might be subject to interpretation of that information—so what? As it happens in the Crucible: if you have done nothing wrong, you need not fear the establishment—unless of course said establishment is run by little girls exacting revenge due to unfulfilled sexual desires by a largely older man.

Myself being a previous victim of identity theft, I know that my information can be stolen. I witnessed it first hand when I was across seas in Germany. I was notified while attempting to make an online purchase that my bank card provider had shut-down the account due to irregular spending in multiple locations around the world. After reviewing my transaction history, it appeared that I purchased a large amount of magazines, some winter-hiking gear from a shop in southern Germany and approximately five-hundred dollars’ worth of flowers in Canada—partially in Quebec and partially in British Columbia. It’s true, somebody had accessed my in-hind-sight, less-than-secure internet connection from my sub-let apartment in a little town in Germany known as Fulda and had proceeded to copy all of my information.

But I was not afraid because I had planned for this; I had emergency accounts and cards; subconsciously hidden large sums of cash in multiple denominations among my books and journals etc.;  and a large traveler’s insurance policy which would cover any non-reimbursed expenditure I should receive. The key to living safely in this modern society is not to think you can beat ‘big brother’ by keeping your information off the internet and out of the system, but to have a back-up plan to not be damaged and have leeway in your actions should something like this occur.

But where does this all stand with David Perry, and additionally in my case with Daniel Gayo-Avello who I will address in a second; it stands through his attempt to categorize and detail, although briefly, the expansion of the economy of knowledge—to derive from Lanham.  In Ubiquitous Surveillance we see through the introduction a shocking dialogue of all the possible ways we are being kept tabs on, from the government wiretapping, to Gayo-Avello’s attempt to categorize Twitter users according to their tweets, to business information being stored on computers—and subsequently stolen as was my case.

We are members of a global collective in which “Foucault’s panopticon is right about one aspect of our contemporary lives, it is in the conception that the real power is not with Big Brother, but rather distributed throughout the social space. In Foucault’s account the state observes people and thereby produces altered behavior, but also, importantly, a common sense of correct behavior develops, and individuals alter their behavior as well in the name of social conformity. In this sense, Big Brother is not the government—rather, Big Brother is us. The ease with which we can monitor each other and self-monitor our behavior accordingly resembles this particular aspect of Foucault’s panopticon on steroids.” (Perry, Ubiquitous Surveillance)

We are so concerned about being watched that we change the way we act, this is perhaps the reason that we, as according to Orenstein, change the way we act and are constantly putting on a show. This brings in the virtual conundrum that if we are the ‘Big Brother’ as Perry asserts and we are policing ourselves in both the security realm and in the realm of social interaction, then are we just not creating the own script to our own theatrical play in which we are dully the actors and the audience? I suppose, as many theatrical works do, that the theme increasingly becomes unrealistic and crazed in superfluous fashions and ideas as the plot progresses, and as we, the audience, bite at the bit attempting to consume more of this cacophony of the phony do we not simply write more of it? I have to wonder, when does it all become asymptotic, undefined, uncatagorical, unreasonable?

To align with this, I was not entirely pleased with the work of Gayo-Avello, mostly because I found it hopelessly flawed. They are first riding on the huge assumption that we actually tweet things that represent us. From my above presentation, that would inherently be incorrect; however, my dissertation aside, I do not feel the data was fairly obtained. Investigate, if you will, the scanned for terms in several of the data and you will surely find a wondrous discrepancy as to the amount and readily used availability of such terms. Compare if you will on page 4 of the PDF found here (Daniel Gay-Avello, 4), the varying amounts of terms between Republican and Democrat, or Homosexual and Heterosexual, and peruse the ethnicities and even the religions and you will find a rather large discrepancy in amounts. Logically speaking, the more search terms you search for, the more results you will receive—it’s the central core of how search engines work for example, and this McC-Splat algorithm, however weighted the A variable happens to be, will still result in the same statistical error. Although Perry admits that some of the data and mathematics he does not understand at that Gayo-Avello does not wholly intend to purport that the data was sufficient but that investigations and labeling of this kind will increase as technology increases—and even our most cherished secrets will be open to the public. Just like the deep-packet research, anybody will be able to determine our sexuality, our political leanings, or our religion—no matter how straight faced you might seem about it.

For my part, I am a little jaded—perhaps I don’t care, or perhaps, as my previous assertion holds, I think we all are leading fake idealized perceptions of ourselves. That is our internet projections are entirely different than who we actually are, let them search, let them analyze—I have my secrets and they are safe in the world’s safest bank—my memory. Until they learn to scan my thoughts—don’t worry that’s also underway with MRI machines—I’ll be fine, and I have plenty of time to learn mental-scatter patterns to confuse the machines and their results, let the EKG/EEG firestorm training begin—after all, I need to prove that I am alive (Perry, prgh. 6)

Attribution
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Sadie Wears Tin-Foil Hat originally uploaded by evilsciencechick
Original Sadie here

Big Brother originally uploaded by Breen’s Photos
Original Big Brother here