Digital Writing: Privacy, Control, and Surveillance on the Internet
EMAC 4325-Fall 2010
Professor David Parry
University of Texas at Dallas
Photo of Bansky Graffiti.
Course Description:
“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” -Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems C.E.O.
The average citizen in London is caught on camera 300 times each day. In a recent interview Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, proclaimed privacy is dead. China, as well as almost every other nation, restricts access to certain content on the internet. Cell phone carriers regularly track their customers movement. And, what content you access online is anything but anonymous. In the network age it would appear that the values of transparency, openness, sharing, and data collection have replaced those of anonymity and privacy. The ubiquitous presence of monitoring devices and seemingly never ending, and infinitely retained, amount of information being collected forces us to renegotiate our sense of the public and the private. Do people really not value privacy anymore? Who benefits from all this “publicness”? and who gets to decide? While many have suggested that the internet is the ultimate “panopticon,” it is perhaps more correct to suggest, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has, that the internet is a “Non-opticon”—it works precisely because you don’t know the extent to which you are being monitored and controlled. The goal of this class is to turn this “non-opticon” inside-out, to make viewable all the ways in which privacy, control, and surveillance are figured and refigured in the networked digital age.
What Are You Looking For?
Current Assignment
Individuals:
- email me your preferred email address to get permission to edit this wiki
- email me your twitter user name and follow @emacprofdave
- watch the two films for next Monday
- We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner (available on Netflix streaming, Amazon rental, iTunes rental)
- Erasing David, David Bond (available on iTunes rental, Amazon)
- make a plan for getting the required books
Groups:
- set up your group's website and email me the url
- hand in your community rules along with names of everyone in the group
- rules should include group expectations, plans and means for removing someone from the group if need be
- write a couple of posts about your groups topic, just to get things going
- set up a delicious account for sharing links
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