Daniel Knapp
Everyday life under conditions of pervasive surveillance
Recent years have seen a surge of literature on the role of surveillance in contemporary Western societies. Whereas surveillance has been considered as an intrinsic part of modernity since Max Weber, some contemporary authors claim that we are moving towards a ‘Surveillance Society’, in which surveillance pervades every aspect of everyday life, impinges on subjects in ever new configurations and becomes a defining characteristic residing over of life chances in even the most mundane situations.
This project analyses surveillance on the internet as a particular technosocial context from the perspective of everyday life.
It investigates how everyday practices of managing individual appearances on the internet are enacted under conditions of pervasive surveillance, in how far these are traits of an emerging culture of surveillance and how individual actors negotiate conceptions of visibility in the context of the increasingly algorithmic nature of surveillance processes.
Drawing on an growing body of work in surveillance studies which abandons the idea of surveillance as a linear, top-down process, this project argues that a thorough understanding of surveillance on the internet needs to move beyond approaches based on a paradigm of discipline and control which regards subjects of surveillance merely as docile bodies.
Instead, it develops a framework which takes into account the multi-directional, fluid and contradictory nature of surveillance on the internet which can accommodate not only infrastructures and other systems of surveillance, but also subjects as active agents involved in surveillance processes.
In doing so, the project aims to move beyond notions of resistance as possible responses to surveillance and leaves the meaning-making of surveillance between a dichotomy of care and control to the individual actors themselves.
Apart from his PhD studies at Goldsmiths, Daniel also is Head of Advertising Research at IHS Screen Digest, a London based research and consulting company.