Comparing Foucault's View Of Surveillance And Social Media

The topic of surveillance is a dominant theme in contemporary political discourse. The news media, social media, and ordinary conversations directly or indirectly cover various forms of surveillance. As an increasingly dominant force in modern ways of being, surveillance may be explored from a multiplicity of perspectives, disciplines, and logics. In this brief critical analysis, I aim to address two central themes inspired from our multilogues and scholarly readings. First, I will explore Foucault’s notion of the “regime of truth” as it relates to the knowledge and power nexus, and particularly the ways in which expert knowledge of surveillance can be dangerous to historically marginalized populations. To further deepen and explain my thoughts,

Indeed, drawing from Foucault “…knowledge is never neutral, it is always connected to power.” Technical experts have the legitimacy to categorize certain individuals and/or groups as constituting risk or danger to society, and as such subject them to surveillance. The knowledge of experts is related to power/use of force/government because it has the capacity to influence who is subject to online dataveillance, regulation, constraints, and profiling. It is naïve to propose that state security agencies forgo expert knowledge in conducting surveillance. However, it is problematic when expert knowledge is presented under the guise of technical neutrality or scientific objectivity. When knowledge is linked to power, it does not merely assume the authority of truth, but it also possesses the capacity to make itself true. Moreover, expert knowledge is not merely the result of objective mathematical probabilities, or neutral inferences. Experts are conditioned by societal factors, norms, stereotypes, and assumptions regarding human behaviour. These concerns are at the core of political discourse; hence, I think this is a significant concern as we are exploring the politics of surveillance. The use of probability to infer that certain behaviours and spaces and habits may constitute risk is an extremely complex task. Predicting human behaviour requires innumerable presumptive assumptions and determinative predictions about human behaviour.

Indeed, the development of new surveillance technologies is a relatively inexpensive and easy way to track, identify, and monitor categories of risky people. However, despite general awareness that our private lives are under the scrutiny of the government, the exact nature and extent of surveillance, as well as, the processes by which individuals and/or groups are singled out and identified as suspicious or rewarded as compliant remains unclear. This raises critical concerns regarding whether civil liberties are violated in the search for information and security. Here the novel term, “social sorting” is useful, as the term highlights the manner by which new forms of categorizations are enabled by new statistical and software practices which tend to reproduce and amplify social divisions. A critical gaze may be concerned with the ways in which surveillance technologies and data-mining by security agencies for example, may systematically perpetuate despicable forms of discrimination and social exclusion. However, it is worthy to note that surveillance can also be used to remedy and rectify historical and distributional inequalities created by individuals. The impacts of dataveillance is dependent upon the people behind the surveillance, engineers, experts, and policy-makers etc., It would be a mistake to understand my argument as a totalizing attack upon surveillance.