Surveillance & Society: the fully peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online surveillance studies journal.
This seems like an interesting publication, but: five years on ... why have I never heard of it? (Perhaps because it's mostly a UK publication, with one US-based editor, Torin Monahan, at Arizona State, where they have a School of Justice & Social Inquiry.) Although the description for his course opens with "How are surveillance technologies altering social life in post-9/11 worlds?", the syllabus spends a lot of time on Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It also spends time on Paul Virilio, Steve Mann, RTMark, "Minority Report" and "Gattaca", but little of this is "post-9/11". I am curious about how this journal fits into the literature. The editorial board is all academic; this sets it apart from, say, Studies in Intelligence, where authors tend to be practitioners/professionals (though not just of "surveillance"). I only recognize a few authors published here, like Steve Wright (2) and Steve Mann (2, 3). To see whether this publication is getting cited elsewhere, I asked Google Scholar. Things are being cited (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), but where are those citations getting published? Setting aside the internal citations, most of the references are in publications like CCTV, Sociology, British Journal of Criminology, Transactions in GIS, Tourist Studies, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Optical Engineering, Games and Culture, European Journal of Social Work, Citizenship Studies, and Nursing Inquiry. I did find some citations among the "mainstream" publishers, like ACM and IEEE. Here, I'll name the papers: 'Affective' computing and emotion recognition systems: the future of biometric surveillance? Cool Hunting the Kids' Digital Playground: Datamining and the Privacy Debates in Children's Online Entertainment Sites Communication Privacy Management in Electronic Commerce A qualitative study of the occupational subculture of information systems employees in organizations
Some of these are self-citations. A Google Blog Search reveals that many of the mentions of this publication are on now-defunct fake/auto-generated Blogspot accounts. In the process of compiling this post, I was reminded about Ars Electronica 2007: A new culture of everyday life is now upon us, bracketed by the angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media. One in which everything seems to be public and nothing’s private anymore. Panopticon or consummate individual freedom of expression? At symposia, exhibitions, performances and interventions, the 2007 Ars Electronica Festival will delve into what the public and private spheres have come to mean and the interrelationship that now exists between them. Dates: September 5-11. Location: throughout the City of Linz.
I remember wanting to go to this conference back in the day, when they had Richard Dawkins, Douglas Rushkoff, John L. Casti, Geert Lovink, Mark Dery, EBN, Hotwired, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Virilio (*), Rodney Brooks, Pattie Maes, Kevin Kelly, Simson Garfinkel, Eric Drexler, Slavoj Zizek (*), and so many more, all in one place. Surveillance & Society Homepage |
