Surveillance is the Future of the Spectacle - Surveillance, data analysis and the Spectacle…
The tools through which the spectacle relates to you and manages your expectations are in the process of changing. Whereas for the past twenty years the predominant method through which this has taken place has been through the heterogeneous set of tools and methods derived from the network society at the moment this is in the process of changing again. This text outlines some of the new methods developing as a consequence of the new hybrid mediums, most obviously the new social media forms.
Up to the minute information on everything from train times, cinema schedules to available books, apps have become a ubiquitous feature of smart-phones and tabular computers (Ipads). To their users they are mostly just useful and entertaining tools. However whilst they provide users with information they are also data collection software devices. This has placed apps at the beginning of the science of data gathering for the business use of consumer data. In the collection of reusable consumer data nothing is to insignificant not to be collected.
The collection of surveillance data associated with these types of technology (for example image, sound, GPS data) is in its infancy. Smart-phones, social networks and the other elements of digital everyday life are generating new data sets that are beginning to reconstruct the digital and non-digital economy. Embedding you ever more deeply in the spectacle.
This surveillance data is an aspect of the trend towards the normalization of the technological lexicon which we can summarize as ‘big data’ This requires that rather than summarizing small subsets of the data being collected as part of the enormous flood of data being collected, they can analyse all of it. This developing ability to analyse the enormous mass of surveillance information is beginning to develop new business and control ideas and will as time passes change the relationship between the business, the institutions and their customers.
Why is this surveillance you might ask …? remember Steve Jobs having to apologize in 2011 because Apple handled the location of Ipad and Iphone owners so badly and the congressional hearings in Washington that resulted ?
The obvious ways in which this surveillance data will be used is to be combined across the social network data and to generate new services and products for their customers – so that for example messages will tell you “that these people are near you and here is how you might know them” This seemingly harmless social network ploy will translate into new products and then into targeted advertising to generate new customers. The increasing amount of digital information and the increasingly sophisticated ways being developed to make use of it, across the entire array of institutions in our society begins to show us the ways in which companies are beginning to be drawn into this new world of data collection and analysis.
Two obvious ways forward exists – firstly they will develop ways of tailoring their products and services to match the preferences of their customers, secondly more directly tailored advertising designed to more accurately access their customers. Then of course the data is being sold by the collectors of the data to corporations who can use the data for new customer generation…
Even the most ardent supporters of this new spectacular use of the traces and data you generate and leave across the internet understand that it requires the generation of a new system of rights. Rights that create a balance between the conflicting needs of individuals, governments and the corporations who hold the data. Members of parliaments and government workers may be considered what these controls and restrictions should be, but still no such global agreement yet exists. Instead the signs are, if we are honest that the spectacle and its owners will be allowed to own the data that constitutes our histories and be positively encouraged to model our human imaginaries. No longer simply virally infecting our minds with the spectacle but instead having digital copies of our minds, close enough to know what and how to sell us customized products and services.
The analysis of the information is developing and with it the changes in the methods we use for decision making. The new methods being based on intensive data analysis and the testing of actions. Managers and controllers of institutions will have to learn to ask the right questions rather than guess.
The sources of the data will be from across the vast array of the spectacle, surveillance being the primary sources from the social and mass media, data networks and all others forms of generated content, from traffic sensors to medical monitors. Anywhere that people spend their lives online they will be monitored, content managed and new inputs into their minds and lives generated. Every moment, every action will be commodified….
The information has been unstructured until now, but now as the databases grow ever larger, the analysis methods grown more sophisticated and the representational models grow closer and closer to the people they model, well the information which you might think of as commercial signifiers are becoming more obvious. They will be fed back to the point of origin as spectacular instructions to consume more…
Part two of this draft will investigate this in further depth
i wondered what this note reads ;ile 12 years later…