Experiencing surveillance
pp. 73-84
in: Andrew Feenberg, Norm Friesen (eds), (Re)inventing the internet, Berlin, Springer, 2012Abstract
In response to the increasingly quotidian, even banal character of surveillant practices in postindustrial societies, this chapter explores the possibility of a theoretical and methodological re-alignment in surveillance studies. This realignment entails a move from broadly Foucauldian, macro-level, structural or poststructural analyses, to the existential–phenomenological study of subjective consciousness and experience. This piece illustrates such an experiential study by taking part of Sartre's famous description of "the look," and comparing it to a similarly experientially based description of an everyday context of surveillance— specifically, a bank machine or ATM transaction.
