Daniel Neyland,(CRICT, Brunel University)
My research seeks to analyse Closed Circuit Television cameras as socio-technological systems which have a burgeoning impact both in the retail shopping environment and in academia. Rather than investigating surveillance issues or hidden ideological power struggles, my work looks at the construction, refining and redefining of identities. Based in a town 10 miles east of London, this year-long research centres on interviews with members of the public and managers of a CCTV system alongside ethnographic data gathered through observations of the system's operatives and public activity in the CCTV area.
The picture that emerges is of simultaneous, multiple constructions, fluidly drawn on by people in the visual range of cameras, who perceive their interactivity to be aimed at a far wider, disparate and more abstract audience than any single specific system. These public displays are then read by the operatives of the system, who supply their own meanings and identity constructions to the seen activity. Successive levels of management negotiation, renegotiation and the restrictions of the system's legal guidelines, however, help in guiding these operatives' readings of the public. Beyond this, wider governmental structures, the judicial system and even the media can be influential players in how a scene is read locally and how this reading is subsequently acted upon or transformed. Thus there are public identity displays fed into the semi-permeable privacy of the CCTV control room which are read, re-read and renegotiated at each stage they pass through: how these multiple, simultaneous readings emerge and are maintained or transformed is the key to this research.
Nancy Koppelman, (Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University)
This paper argues that there is an instructive relationship between technologies of individual movement and the construction of social identity in antebellum America. My argument rests on the premise that shoes and horses were the primary technologies of individual movement during the period in question. From this premise, the paper uses both secondary and primary sources to compare how horses and shoes facilitated both individual movement, and, to the extent that such movement expressed private desire, the public expression of social identity.
Social identity shaped how and whether particular inhabitants of North America publicly could realize the private desire to move about. For the wealthy, movement entailed access to private horses and carriages, or the choice to walk about in order to publicly enact privilege by "promenading." Such movement was socially acceptable, and depended on both control of technologies of movement, and the right to access public roads without raising suspicions. In contrast, some American inhabitants--slaves, indentured servants, transients and vagrants, lone women, and indeed, persons without simple access to a pair of serviceable shoes, for example--have enjoyed neither the right to travel freely, nor easy access to technologies that would facilitate such movement. Considering shoes as a technology of movement in this manner raises questions about how social identity and technological forms have together informed and shaped the historiography of American social and cultural life. More specifically, it encourages a reconsideration of the path-breaking labor historiography of the shoe industry as, in part, an industry with significant implications for the culture of individual movement, and for the construction of identity in a material sense. And because individual movement is an expression of private desire on public space, the humble shoe becomes a culturally loaded object: shoes helped to shape the experience of individual freedom, the realization of private desire, and the multiplication of power in public--in order words, of social and economic "mobility," which is one of the hallmarks of the nation's identity.
Jean-François Blanchette,(S&TS, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
The daily interaction of individuals with information systems has made it possible for modern organizations to capture extensive (and ever increasing) amounts of transactional data. Technological advances in storage technology have provided the means for retaining such data for indefinite periods of time. One side-effect of data retention is the disappearance of a form of "social forgetfulness," whereby individuals are given the opportunity for a "fresh start" in life. In this paper, we examine three social arenas where the importance of such a principle is explicitly affirmed: bankruptcy law, juvenile crime records, and credit reports. We point out that debates over computerization and identity have largely ignored changes in social, institutional, and individual memory, focusing instead on issues of privacy protection. We introduce a notable exception, the 1978 French Informatique et Libertes law, which enunciates clear principles for the erasure of personal and transactional data after specified periods of time. Such principles have been based on the legal notion of a "right to be forgotten," which French law describes as essential in the capacity for personal change and the formation of individual identity. We argue that the French experience provides a compelling argument for the importance of stipulating retention periods within data collection practices. We conclude by situating this work within the context of global changes in the nature of social memory occasioned by electronic record-keeping practices.
Go back to Technology & Identity Conference
Last Update: February 1, 1999
"The Construction, Maintenance and Refutation of Boundaries, Identities and Stories in CCTV"
"One for the Road: Movement and Identity in Antebellum America"
"Data Retention and the Right to Be Forgotten, Or Record-Keeping With a French Attitude" (Joint work with Deborah Johnson from Georgia Tech.)