We are living in a time of unprecedented surveillance. Governments and private corporations gather increasing amounts of information about citizens; employers monitor more and more aspects of their employees’ lives; CCTV cameras are ubiquitous in urban public spaces; spying on people over social media sites has become a pervasive pastime; and we are even increasingly engaging in self-surveillance through the use of health and fitness monitors. The era’s preeminent medium of communication the internet, in fact, is built upon an economic model of mass surveillance (Lanier, 2013). The new practices of surveillance that characterize late modern society present unique challenges to sociolinguists, first because surveillance has become central to many practices we normally concern ourselves with, from education to migration, second, because these new practices of surveillance have reshaped the way we conduct social interaction, and finally because sociolinguists themselves are increasingly being recruited as accomplices in government and industry sponsored practices of surveillance in areas such as immigration, and crime prevention. At the same time, surveillance is not a new phenomena; numerous scholars from Bateson to Goffman have argued that all social interaction is to some degree predicated on practices of surveillance (Jones, 2017).
The purpose of this panel is to explore how tools from sociolinguistics can help us to understand how people interact within the ‘surveillant assemblages’ that have come to make up everyday life. The first paper examines practices of surveillance directed towards the British Muslim community. The second discusses how digital surveillance using algorithms is changing how we understand principles of pragmatics. The third paper presents a corpus-assisted analysis of academics and non-academics discourse on ‘surveillant landscapes’. The forth paper looks at practices of self-surveillance in the context of health and fitness monitoring, and the final paper views surveillance in historical terms offering a model of surveillance that sees it as the interaction between ‘over-looking’ (surveillance) and under-looking (sousveillance).
References
Lanier, J. (2013). Who Owns the Future?. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Jones, R. (2017). Surveillant media. In C. Cotter and D. Perrin eds. The Routledge Hand book of Language and Media. London: Routledge
