ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the key concepts in the study of media and surveillance as it relates to language and social interaction. It examines a number of critical issues, especially relating to the affordances introduced by digital media for facilitating new practices of surveillance, sousveillance, and co-veillance. The chapter explores how "surveillance functions are built into communications media", how media change the way surveillance is carried out, why it is carried out, and how people organize their social interactions, social relationships, and social identities around it. It focuses on how concepts from linguistics and discourse analysis can help us to understand how media affect practices of surveillance by making possible new ways of entextualizing information and by altering the participation frameworks of social interactions. In the age of digital media, not only have the surveillant functions of media come to rival their communicative functions, but surveillance and communication have become intimately intertwined.
