Our final assignment will consist of two parts: one critical and one creative.
1) The first task is to write an essay of at least 1500 words that identifies, articulates, and critically analyzes at least three key components/tenets of surveillance culture or surveillance ideology, with specific references to at least three texts we’ve encountered (of whatever medium(s): fiction/nonfiction/comic/film/TV/game).
In slightly more detail, here’s what I mean by this. People often talk about technologies as though they precede culture and ideology—as though technological advances come first (out of nowhere, presumably), and then we develop cultural and ideological attitudes about those technologies, which remain a sort of secondary, less important thing. But every set of technologies emerges out of a specific cultural context, a set of beliefs and values that encourages the invention, production, and adoption of those technologies. Yes, technologies have all sorts of cultural ramifications, but the causal arrow runs in the other direction, too.
In class, we’ve talked about surveillance culture and surveillance ideology as the set of cultural and ideological conditions necessary for surveillance to thrive in the way it seems to be thriving at present. Surveillance culture and surveillance ideology aren’t just the reactive attitudes we have after the fact of surveillance, but the cultural, ideological, mythological, political, and psychological components that make widespread surveillance possible in the first place. What cultural narratives or truisms have to circulate to make increasingly common and increasingly powerful kinds of surveillance seem normal or acceptable? What ideological claims or beliefs have to gain currency in order to justify and normalize surveillance? What stories do we tell ourselves about the world that have the side effect of making surveillance seem desirable or inevitable? What common-sense notions do we have that happen to reinforce the desirability or inevitability of surveillance? What things do we have to be convinced of first before we can be convinced to offer up our data freely to Facebook and Google, or to stand without complaint in an airport body scanner, or to roll our eyes at someone protesting against warrantless wiretapping or preemptive law enforcement monitoring of “populations of interest”? In other words, what is the nature of the cultural and ideological air that surveillance (by government, by corporations, by each other, by ourselves) needs to breathe?
Part of the justification for this class’s focus on fiction (across various media forms) is that fiction is an integral part of the cultural/ideological fabric, and can thus often provide particularly useful articulations of and insights into these things. So as you identify and analyze at least three components of surveillance culture/surveillance ideology, it makes sense to engage with at least three of the texts we’ve read/watched/played over the course of the semester, since our specimen texts have produced (and sometimes embodied) a lot of interesting insight into the culture and ideology of surveillance.
I want to be abundantly clear about this: I am not looking for a restatement or a summary of things I’ve already said in class, though of course you might synthesize parts of our class conversations in interesting ways. I’m looking for you to take our class conversations, your forum and Twitter posts, and the texts we’ve encountered as the collective foundation of an insightful essay about surveillance culture and surveillance ideology. I’m looking for you to push beyond merely rearticulating things that have been said in class, to teach your reader (in this case, me) something new, to bring some new insight to the key questions of the class. Ideally you would be using the collective wisdom and insight we’ve all generated together over the last fifteen weeks to catalyze your own original thought on these questions. Again, my goal is not to have my own words mirrored back at me enthusiastically (even if you think I’m right about certain things), but to hear how you have synthesized and thought through everything we’ve done in class and to see what insights you’ve been able to extrapolate out of that foundation.
Note: you should also feel more than free to cite tweets and ANGEL posts by yourself or by any of your classmates. I consider all of these things a part of the archive of the class, right alongside PKD and Claudia Rankine and The Wire and my endless in-class ramblings.
* * *
2) The second task is more open-ended: I want you to produce some kind of creative response to or depiction of the future of surveillance. This might be a short story, or a comic, or a collage, or a video, or a standup routine, or a brief fictional podcast, or a board game, or any other kind of creative artifact you might imagine. Whatever kind of thing you produce, and whatever your feelings on surveillance are (positive, negative, excited, panicked, neutral, apathetic), you should think seriously about where you imagine surveillance and surveillance culture are taking or will take us, and how you might best depict, represent, or respond to that. What creative form would best suit your imagining of the future of surveillance? What aspects of the future of surveillance do you especially want to emphasize or explore, and what creative form will best allow you to focus on those aspects? It might be worth thinking here about the differences between the various kinds of texts on the syllabus: how was a comic about surveillance or a film about surveillance different from a game about surveillance or a novel about surveillance?
The one caveat here, of course, is that I’m moving across the country and thus won’t be able to pick up anything material. So if you do something in material form, you’ll need to find a way to capture it digitally—take photos of your collage, send me digital copies of the design for your board game, take a video of your sculpture or standup routine, etc. I realize this might be an inconvenient limitation for some of you, but unfortunately there really isn’t any way around it.
* * *
Both of these components are due in the ANGEL dropbox by 5:00pm on Friday, May 8th. If you have any questions, please let me know sooner rather than later, as I will be on the road most of the week and will have a harder time responding to emails. As always, I am excited—kind of ridiculously excited, in all honesty—to see what you all come up with.