With a tip of the hat to Wallace Stevens and his blackbird, our second major assignment will aim to shed light on surveillance and surveillance culture through a prism of multiple perspectives.  Specifically, you should produce each of the following thirteen pieces as a way of articulating what surveillance culture is and does, arranged in whatever order you see fit:

• a tweet-length definition (exactly 140 characters, counting the course hashtag) of either surveillance or surveillance culture —I tweeted an example a little over two months ago
• a haiku that embodies or illustrates surveillance or surveillance culture in some way (note not only the standard line/syllable counts but the other characteristics listed here, especially the impressionistic orientation and the notes about tone, language, and syntax)
• a recipe for surveillance or surveillance culture, specifying both ingredients and process
• a two-sentence short story that embodies or illustrates surveillance or surveillance culture in some way (these two-sentence horror stories should give you some ideas for how this might be done)
• an essay of exactly 50 words on the effects of surveillance and surveillance culture on the surveilled
• another essay of exactly 50 words on the effects of surveillance and surveillance culture on the surveillers (note:  by “essay” in these two items, I mean that even though these are obviously both microscopically short pieces of writing, they should make and demonstrate some specific claim, however briefly/efficiently; they should begin and end, and they should have some unity as pieces of writing)
• a dramatic monologue or diary entry of roughly 150 words from the point of view of surveillance personified—so if surveillance were a person, and it were expressing its internal monologue aloud or in writing, what would it say? (note:  this might be in either written or recorded audio form—if the latter, Soundcloud is a free and easy way of posting audio, and it is easily embeddable within Storify [click on the plus sign to the right of all of the source icons on the right sidebar and drag Soundcloud from available sources to selected sources], WordPress, and more or less any other frequently-used blogging or aggregation platform)
• an obituary of roughly 100 words for surveillance or surveillance culture, in the imagined scenario of it ending or dying
• a sentence beginning with either “Surveillance wants . . .” or “Surveillance culture wants . . .”
• a sentence beginning with either “Surveillance can’t . . .” or “Surveillance culture can’t . . .”
• a five-senses description, in either list form or complete sentences:  what surveillance/surveillance culture looks like, sounds like, feels like, smells like, and tastes like
• a visual, but not photographic, depiction of surveillance or surveillance culture that you draw or assemble yourself; examples might include a map, a portrait, a one- or two-panel comic, an abstract drawing, etc.—but not a photograph (note:  I’m not expecting you to be phenomenally gifted visual artists—I’m not judging these on visual-artistic skill, but on how clever and insightful you manage to be in a visual form)
• a scan or photo of one page from one of the fictional texts we’ve read, annotated by you—so with key words, moments, or phrasings marked or highlighted, with comments written in the margins, with arrows connecting words or phrases that connect to or comment upon one another in interesting ways, and so on (note:  these annotations should not just document your immediate reactions, such as whether you like or dislike a particular line or character, but rather should be a way of processing and making sense of the text, putting it into conversation with itself)

So.

1 tweet + 1 haiku + 1 recipe + 1 short story + 2 essays (surveilled, surveillers) + 1 diary/monologue + 1 obituary + 2 sentences (surveillance wants, surveillance can’t) + 1 description + 1 visual + 1 annotated page = 13 ways of looking at a watchbird

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Probably the easiest way to put this together—especially since you’re now more or less familiar with how it works—would be Storify (though you’re welcome to do it another way if you prefer).  You can assemble and arrange the items in whatever order and whatever fashion you like, provided they’re all there.  You might or might not have text between some of the items, weaving them together.  You might or might not have an intro and/or conclusion of some sort.  For the textual items, you might either type them in the Storify story itself (by clicking in a blank space to start a text field), or you might embed them as other kinds of objects (e.g. a tweet, or a screen-captured image of the text written by hand, or an audio recording of the text embedded via Soundcloud, or a video of you reading or scrolling through the text embedded via YouTube, etc.).  You should, as always, feel free to be creative with this, even beyond the creativity the assignment more or less forces you into; again, as long as you’re including each of the specified items, any further embellishment or alteration is entirely up to you.

The goal here is to generate some traction on surveillance and surveillance culture by looking at them from a number of different perspectives, articulating them in a number of different ways, zooming in on different parts and presenting them in different lights.  One thing we’ve discovered over the course of the semester is that surveillance culture is a difficult thing to see, identify, and understand if we’re looking at it head-on; attempting to tackle it in total is like staring at the sun, or like tracking the movement of some object that’s always in our peripheral vision.  The hope here is that even if it’s prohibitively difficult to articulate clearly and directly what surveillance culture is and how it works—the staring at the sun model—then we can at least assemble some incisive sense of it from these various partial, peripheral-vision perspectives.

In other words:  maybe this haphazard assemblage of a bunch of weird little objects is really the only way to pin down surveillance culture, to delineate and articulate and analyze it, to poke and prod at its workings.