Our first major assignment will consist of two (closely related) parts.

1) Your first task is to articulate, analyze, and document your own surveillance footprint.  Over the first five weeks of this course, we’ve all come to notice more and more ways in which we are captured, documented, witnessed, watched, listened to, or recorded by various mechanisms of surveillance.  I want you to describe and document (in whatever ways and media forms you want to/are able to) the systems, mechanisms, and structures of surveillance by which you are captured in the average day.  Where, when, how, in what circumstances, by whom, and for what purpose are you surveilled?  To what uses are these various forms of data about you put?  How and where might that data be shared?  Who has access to it?  Who might be interested in it, and for what reasons?  If some surveillance overlord figure had access to every piece of surveillance data you produce in an average day, what would that composite picture of you look like?

You should include in this part of the assignment (incorporated into the document itself, as much as possible) at least some concrete documentation:  a screen capture of the sleep data app  you use to tell you how well you’re sleeping each night, photos of surveillance cameras at places you frequent, a (redacted) image of your GPS history or your browser history or what have you, a timestamped receipt from a parking garage, a stealthy video of someone watching you at Starbucks, and so on.

2) Then, I want you to compose a fictional narrative based on this composite image of you, this “data double,”—a story your hypothetical surveillance overlord, with access to all of your surveillance data for a given day, might tell about who you are and what you’re up to.  The hinge, though, is that this narrative should be false, incomplete, or inaccurate in some way.  It should accord with your surveillance data, but not with the actual facts of who you are or what you do.  In other words, it should explore some gap between the actual substance of your life and personality, and the data that surveillance might produce out of that life.

 

Part 1 should be at least 800 words; part 2 should be at least 300 words.  I’m absolutely open to the use of other media forms (for instance, your data double story might be a video or a podcast or something else), but please run it by me first.

I very much look forward to seeing what you come up with!