ABSTRACT
Surface monitoring is a technology that, at first sight, is more aligned with the ‘old’ idea of state power than with our new situation in which state and corporate power join forces and intrude into our intimate forms of communication, which we have given over to a hyper-connected technology. Inhabiting surveillance can mean to live within a situation in which multi-level surveillance is being normalized to such an extent that its pervasiveness moves into mundane, everyday experience, a backdrop, hardly even noticed anymore, but therefore also possibly having an even greater impact on pre-reflected ‘being’ and behaviour than when it is consciously acknowledged. The ‘fiction of being captured’ combines an experiential account of the interiority of the main characters with an ethnographic, hyper-realistic rendering of the contemporary lifeworlds of Britain under visual surveillance premised on surface monitoring as the structuring device of the narrative.
