ABSTRACT
Monitoring by electronic and televisual means is an increasingly significant mode of governance. Surveillance, the collation and storage of information concerning a subject population and the direct supervision of that population’s conduct, is usually conceptualized as an activity engaged in by elites for purposes of controlling subordinate social classes. Indeed, the usual understanding of the term surveillance is of an omnipresent, omnipotent, and centralized political apparatus keeping tabs on its citizens. In the present work, however, we are concerned with the more generalized, dispersed, and overlapping practices of social monitoring made possible by the proliferation of information and communication technologies in the early twenty-first century. The mass production of camcorders, cell phone cams, spy cams, and other monitoring and recording devices has, for better or for worse, put in the hands of anyone who can afford it the means of televisual surveillance.
