It feels like a big jump in conceptual frameworks to move from interrogating the mere presence of software, to reflecting upon how we are mapped and controlled by technology at large. That said, Philip Agre's approaches to control in the media culture we live in does a great deal to demonstrate just how blurred cultures and computing have become (recalling again Lev Manovich's cultural and computer layer).
What Agre's argument? In a few words, Agre seems to be updating a Gilles Deleuze concept of "Control Society" for the digital, computational age. His update could be called "a capture society" which is contrasted not only with the Deleuze theory (though not explicitly) but also with the surveillance culture, that Agre attributes to Bentham's Panopticon, but again not to Michel Foucault the critic who famously theorized the panopticon as a culture-wide paradigm of control. The glaring oversights of attribution aside, Agre argument is relatively convincing. For each of his arguments, he provides real-world examples that though dated (circa 1994) a re persistent in our culture.
Chiefly, Agre discusses a sort of technophobia that persists in a society that is growing more and more invested in technology, mostly in computing. His analysis, as other analysis before his own revealed (p. 743) that as computers collect more and more information on human subjects, the rising level of security begins to cause anxiety and fear in mankind. As Agre points out, the general rise in computing and informatics related to computing has challenged pre-existing (and by this I mean pre-computer) concepts of privacy, and largely trampled them underfoot.
Here there seems to two questions we should ask. First, what is privacy? Who gets to define it? Are there inalienable standards of privacy that cannot be trespassed upon in human society? Or as Agre himself points out, many times, are humans simply naturalized to ever-shifting standards of privacy.
The second question would relate to the technology that is felt to be invasive. Is it possible for a technology (from the Greek techne for art, craft, or tool) to transgress boundaries of human privacy? Because if that's true, it would seem to follow that mankind has begun to attribute a sort of consciousness to technology, no longer seeing as a tool-craft, inanimate and non-intelligent, but instead as a sort of sciential entity. This may be because in Agre's capture society, technology seems to be a mediation of another human being. Such that all technology archives its experience and can be made to 'betray' its master but providing a record of use and vision. And this would not just be for personal computers. On a larger scale, lots of technology (cellphones, iPods, GPS devices, televisions, cars, etc.) "phone home" to check in with some other entity (human or non-human).
In this way, Agre may be pushing for an understanding that along a teleos of human society and attempts at structuring it, man has moved from watching (surveillance) to directing (control) to archiving (capture), all in the attempt to further regulate how man relates to one another and the artificial structure of governing to which he relates. Along this trajectory, it would seem that we are growing more and more controlled the more we relate and become related to technology. "A 'Computer' - understood as discrete, physically localized entity- begins to lose its force"(743). And we become the computer.*
Which explains the latent paranoia.
1. Is surveillance not a form of capture?
This was the question haunting me throughout the reading. It would seem to me that Agre only differentiates the terms for the same of his argument and that they are not empirically separable. Nevertheless, Agre's boxing off of the term surveillance (which would seem to operate extensively in capture and vice-versa) seems problematic. I wonder if we the readers also consider the terms separable, and if not, why not?
Though it may seem like trite consideration, the very construction of this post (and by extension the blog, the computer I am using, my operating system etc.) are deeply ingrained in what Philip Agre argues is a system of capture, and implicitly, control.
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