Summary
The last half of the 20th century has seen a significant increase in the use of technology for the discovery of personal information … Control technologies have become available that previously existed only in the dystopic imaginations of science fiction writers. (Marx 2002: 9)
the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God. (Agger 2007)
Seated where he could catch the readings on the two gauges of the Voigt-Kampff testing apparatus, Rick Deckard said, ‘I'm going to outline a number of social situations. You are to express your reaction to each as quickly as possible …’
‘And of course’, Rachael said distantly, ‘my verbal response won't count. It's solely the eye-muscle and capillary reaction that you'll use as indices.’ (Dick 1999: 38)
‘You don't want to miss your flight, Vincent.’ (Niccol 1998)
The association of surveillance with technology is longstanding and profound. For many modern people, surveillance primarily is a technological matter, of closed circuit cameras, iris and body scanners, mobile phone intercepts and vague fears of implanted microchips. Gary T. Marx notes in 2002 that the last half of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in the use of control technologies that had previously been the preserve of ‘the dystopic imagination of science fiction writers’. He includes a list of such advances:
video and audio surveillance, heat, light, motion, sound and olfactory sensors, night vision goggles, electronic tagging, biometric access devices, drug testing, DNA analysis, computer monitoring including email and web usage and the use of computer techniques such as expert systems, matching and profiling, data mining, mapping, network analysis and simulation. (Marx 2002: 9)
The variety and reach of such technology, simultaneously impressive and slightly perturbing, has expanded exponentially since Marx wrote those words. Chapter 3 observed that since David Lyon's 2003 assessment of Nineteen Eighty-Four, new forms of social media and their massive everyday use by lightning-fast digital natives and plodding digital dinosaurs have transformed the possibilities of surveillance and have embedded them into the processes of daily life. The chapter on surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four illustrates how utopian writers and filmmakers had explored the possible impact of new and projected technology with surveillance implications, whether the enabled credit cards of Looking Backward or the identity cards of A Modern Utopia, televisual monitoring in Metropolis and Modern Times or genetic scrutiny in Brave New World.
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- Information
- Imagining SurveillanceEutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film, pp. 141 - 154Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015