SURVEILLANCE
NO AGREEMENT ON MEANING
There is no agreement on what surveillance means
Huey 9 Laura Huey, prof of sociology, University of Western Ontario, 2009 Surveillance: Power, Problems, and Politics, Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, eds p 221
The past few years have witnessed incredible growth in the field of surveillance studies. Remarkably, despite this growth, there is no consensus on what forms of human activity are encompassed in the term "surveillance." Derived from the French for watching over, surveillance encompasses the basic activity of watching others. Brian Martin (1993, 115) uses surveillance in this sense when he describes it as "keeping a close watch on others." However this basic definition has been variously expanded upon and/or challenged. Gary Marx (1998), among others, suggests that there has been a notable shift in what consititutes surveillance. Marx distinguished between what he terms traditional surveillance, involving close observation of a targeted individual (e.g. the police officer who trails a suspect), and the new surveillance: technologies designed to systematically extract and collect personal data (e.g., the database that collects, sorts, and creates data profiles of targeted individuals and groups). Whereas traditional surveillance is an exceptional activity, proliferating technologies have made the new surveillance a routine, everyday activity that is largely invisible to those people whom it targets. What these two forms of surveillance share, however, is that each seeks to "eliminate privacy in order to determine normative compliance or to influence the individual." (Marx 2003, 370)
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