Welcome Watching : Paradoxes of Surveillance and Visibility

Surveillance often sparks responses relating to “privacy.” The era of state surveillance, read through warnings like Orwell’s, makes being watched seem negative, undesirable. We want to escape, to hide, or just be “private.” But this approach seems myopic in a world of mass media and now social media. The world of celebrity makes being seen a matter of privilege, of desire. The consequences for surveillance are far-reaching – from the unwanted eye to welcome watching. The desire to be seen may help to naturalize and legitimate surveillance of all kinds, to encourage new modes of cooperation of the surveilled with their surveillors. The desire to discover (large scale surveillance) meets the passion for publicness in social media. Flexibility, mobility and connectivity are sought through social media but users find themselves tracked and recorded using the same media. How do we account for the apparent willingness to be visible to all, or to have a secure or desirable position, when it is known that daily routines and whereabouts are tracked and traced constantly? While social media allows everyone, in a sense, to surveil, it also facilitates in fresh ways classic activities of state agencies. Such forms of surveillance penetrate the time-space paths of everyday life (using constant updates, location tracking). This paper explores these questions sociologically and critically.