Registry Culture and Networked Sociability: Building Individual Identity through Information Records

Introduction

The arrival of the information society and the central role of ITCs have been followed by an increase in the use of expressions like “age of surveillance” or “surveillance society”. This trend is not only visible in “frightening” magazine articles and TV-shows based on “orwellian” predictions, it is also present in academical circles¹, embedded in its language to the extent that some scholars describe their field directly as “surveillance studies” or they declare to research any aspect of the “surveillance societies”.

The purpose of this text it is not to state if the surveillance practices have increased significantly enough as for classifying our societies under such a name. This premise might be a generalized biased approach caused by the growing application of new technologies to the art of watching each other. Nevertheless, at first sight it may also be concluded that we enjoy wider levels of anonymity than we suppose.

The underlying question here refers to the manner in which these analyses undermine the role of individual's active decisions, conscious positions and deliberate actions. While researching surveillance processes, structural connections are excessively remarked and they become a privileged place in the foreground. At the same time, the control of personal information is depicted as a task performed by a cast of experts (whether bureaucrats or marketing managers) who hold the only responsibility in the surveillance relationships and the monopoly of data management.

Of course it is essential to approach this subject having in mind the actual asymmetry of power, and it is precisely due to the subtle nature of power relationships in the network society that it would be a big mistake to ignore the minor actions of control. Therefore, current analyses of surveillance cannot exclude those acts which take place between friends, relatives, acquaintances, etc. Moreover, it is unavoidable to point out along this “soft surveillance” the overcome of unidirectionality through the voluntary contribution of information to be shared, so that others can watch at the same time that are being watched.

After shielding our homes, sometimes even with cutting edge security systems, we leave a lot of locks to let the others see, know and judge a wide portion of what is happening in our lives. This way, a significant amount of data is revealed: what we do, where we are, with whom we spend the time with, what we have, what we think... This trend weakens the traditional approach that describes an image in which the experts of knowledge and information dream of full dictatorial powers that would let them record each movement of the citizens/workers/consumers. In the context of a network society, the old dualizing hierarchies get blurred and are more difficult to appreciate. The scheme that divides surveillance into “watchers” (empowered) versus “watched” (submitted) has to be profoundly reviewed. In networked structures, information flows circulate according to such complex patterns that it is impossible to continue sustaining analyses based exclusively on the useful but confusing and biasing traditional dichotomies.

This wrong perspective makes surveillance research to get focused in two main fields: economics (companies) and politics (governments). Scholars insist in these two topics and media's agendas center their attention in these events. The necessary review to avoid this limitation does not come only from the acts of “outsourcing” that allow and foster “unqualified” personnel to run surveillance-related tasks (a tactic described both in distopyas like 1984 and in reality like the known infiltration of GDR's Stasi into the common people). Not only today but since the beginning of societies, what we understand as “surveillance” embraces a remarkable “third field” linked to phenomena of sociability, socialization and raw social control.