andrejevic (2002) - the work of being watched; interactive media and the exploitation of...

The Work of Being Watched: InteractiveMedia and the Exploitation

of Self-Disclosure

Mark Andrejevic

�—Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoringand data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporatesurveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers whosubmit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participationperform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labordeveloped in the essay is applied to the online economy and the example of interactive TV.The analysis suggests that a critical approach to forms of surveillance facilitated byinteractive media must focus on asymmetries of power and control over informationtechnologies and resources.

DURING the halcyon days of thehigh-tech economy—at the dawn

of the new millennium—an entrepre-neurial-minded former employee of theAirTouch corporation decided tochange his name to DotComGuy andlive his life on-line. For the formerMitch Maddox (a.k.a. DotComGuy)the decision was more than just a life-style decision; it was a business deci-sion. By living his life in front of 25cameras installed in his house and yard,DotComGuy hoped to demonstrate thebenefits of e-commerce, ordering ev-erything he needed on-line so that hewouldn’t have to leave his home for ayear. As an on-line advertisement for

e-commerce—an entrepreneurial Tru-man Burbank—DotComGuy hoped toturn his Website into a for-profit corpo-ration that would generate enoughmoney to support his handlers andearn him a $98,000 paycheck for hisyear-long stint in the DotCompound.

The plan started swimmingly—Dot-ComGuy’s stunt resulted in media cov-erage that drew sponsors and capturedthe attention of viewers, who gener-ated more than a million hits a day forhis Website during its first few months(personal interview with Mitch Mad-dox, Sept. 16, 2000). By the end of theyear, the euphoria over the on-lineeconomy had been replaced by ahealthy dose of skepticism, and as theNASDAQ headed south, so did Dot-ComGuy’s fortunes. On New Year’sDay 2001, DotComGuy left the com-pound behind and forfeited his $98,000payday, keeping as payment only thoseproducts that the company had pur-chased or received for promotional pur-

Mark Andrejevic is an Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Communication at Fairfield Uni-versity. He would like to acknowledge the invalu-able assistance of Bonnie J. Dow and of theessay’s anonymous reviewers in developing themanuscript’s arguments and preparing it forpublication.

Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVol. 19, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 230–248

Copyright 2002, National Communication Association

poses (Copeland, 2001). DotComGuy’sventure may have failed as a businessenterprise, but it succeeded in drawingattention to an important aspect of theemerging online economy: the produc-tivity of comprehensive surveillance.

DotComGuy understood that whilehe was in the DotCompound, he wasworking 24-hours-a-day. Even when hewas sleeping, the image of Maddoxtucked into bed in his Dallas home wassurrounded with banner ads and thenames of sponsors, some of which wereposted on the walls of his house. It wasfor the work he was performing bysubjecting himself to online surveil-lance that DotComGuy was to receivehis $98,000 payday. That he failed toturn a profit doesn’t alter the economicfact upon which his entrepreneurialventure was based: that the emergingonline economy increasingly seeks toexploit the work of being watched.DotComGuy may have failed to capi-talize on this labor as an entrepreneur,but major corporations continue to at-tempt to exploit the economic poten-tial of this labor on a much larger scale.

Some 15 years ago, Jhally and Li-vant (1986), inspired by the work ofDallas Smythe (1977; 1981), arguedthat communication theory needed totake seriously the notion that audi-ences were working when they werewatching television. This paper seeksto develop their argument a bit fur-ther—to update it, as it were, for an eraof new-media interactivity—by high-lighting the emerging significance ofthe work not just of watching, but ofbeing watched. The two complementeach other, insofar as the developmentof interactive media allows for the ratio-nalization of viewing and consumptionin general, thanks to devices like inter-active television that watch us while wewatch. In the era of “reality” TV,

wherein networks are winning ratingsbattles by enlisting people to submittheir lives to comprehensive scrutiny,the claim that being watched is a formof value-generating labor ought not tobe a particularly surprising one. Weare not just facing a world in which afew select members of the audience areentering the celebrity ranks and cash-ing in on their 15 minutes of fame, butone in which non-celebrities—the re-maining viewers—are being recruitedto participate in the labor of beingwatched to an unprecedented degreeby subjecting the details of their dailylives to increasingly pervasive and com-prehensive forms of high-tech monitor-ing. Their viewing habits, their shop-ping habits, even their whereaboutsare subject not just to monitoring butto inclusion in detailed marketing data-bases, thanks to the advent of com-puter-based forms of interactive me-dia. This observation has become acommonplace in the popular literatureon new media and has generated plentyof discussion on the fate of personalprivacy in the on-line economy (see,for example, Garfinkel, 2000; Rosen,2000; Whitaker, 1999). The consensusseems to be that the development ofinteractive media and of computer pro-cessing and storage power enable theincreasing economic exploitation ofcomprehensive forms of consumermonitoring. In response, organizationslike the Electronic Privacy Informa-tion Center (EPIC) have organized toadvocate for consumer privacy rightsand protection from creeping corpo-rate surveillance.

The drawback of much of the discus-sion about privacy, as authors includ-ing Lyon (1994) and Gandy (1993) havesuggested, is that the attempt to defendprivacy rights has a disconcerting ten-dency to work as much in the interest

231

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

of the corporations doing the monitor-ing as in that of the individuals beingmonitored. The development of demo-graphic databases relies heavily on theprotection accorded to private prop-erty, since these databases are profit-able in large part because the informa-tion they contain is proprietary. AsLyon (1994) puts it, “Privacy growsfrom the same modern soil as surveil-lance, which is another reason fordoubting its efficacy as a tool of counter-surveillance” (p. 21).

As an alternative to the popular por-trayal of the proliferation of corporatesurveillance in terms of the incredibleshrinking private sphere, this essay sug-gests an approach influenced by theconcerns of political economy and theanalysis of disciplinary panopticism.Conceived as a form of labor, the workof being watched can be critiqued interms of power and differential accessto both the means of surveillance andthe benefits derived from their deploy-ment. The operative question is notwhether a particular conception of pri-vacy has been violated but, rather: whatare the relations that underwrite entryinto a relationship of surveillance, andwho profits from the work of beingwatched? Such an analysis draws itsinspiration from Robins and Webster’s(1999) assessment of the InformationRevolution as “a matter of differential(and unequal) access to, and controlover, information resources” (p. 91).Gandy (1993), quoting Klaus Lenk, cutsto the heart of the matter:

The real issue at stake is not personalprivacy, which is an ill-defined concept,greatly varying according to the culturalcontext. It is power gains of bureaucracies,both private and public, at the expense ofindividuals and the non-organized sectorsof society. (p. 52)

Foucault’s (1975/1977) discussion ofdisciplinary surveillance offers an ap-proach to the question of power thatseems particularly relevant to the devel-opment of the online economy since itfocuses not so much on the repressiveforce of panopticism, but its produc-tive deployment. The potential of theonline economy that has recently at-tracted so much speculation—both fi-nancial and cultural—is predicated inlarge part on the anticipated productiv-ity of generalized network surveil-lance. The power in question is not thestatic domination of a sovereign BigBrother, but that of a self-stimulatingincitement to productivity: the multipli-cation of desiring subjects and subjects’desires in accordance with the rational-ization of consumption. In this context,the production of ever more refinedand detailed categories of desiring sub-jectivities serves, as Butler’s (1997) anal-ysis suggests, as a site for the reiterationof existing conditions and relations ofpower.

The starting point for an analysis ofsurveillance as exploitation is the asser-tion that just as workplace monitoringcontributes to the rationalization of pro-duction, so on-line surveillance contrib-utes to the rationalization of consump-tion. The attempt to extend themonitoring reach of corporate manag-ers via the internet serves to compelpersonal disclosure by replacing non-monitored forms of consumption withmonitored interactive transactions. Thefollowing sections attempt to trace theoutlines of the process whereby thework of being watched comes to serveas a means of rationalizing not justwhat Jhally and Livant (1986) call thework of watching, but the process ofon-line consumption in general. Thegoal is to offer an alternative approachto the debate over on-line privacy in

232

THE WORK OF BEING WATCHED JUNE 2002

the era of new-media interactivity. Notonly is the privacy defense aligned withthe process it ostensibly contests, but,practically speaking, it has failed toprovide effective resistance to en-croaching surveillance. Indeed, oppo-nents of corporate surveillance seemunable to provide a compelling ratio-nale for privacy protection in an erawhen consumers remain surprisinglywilling to surrender increasingly com-prehensive forms of personal informa-tion in response to offers of conve-nience and customization.

Perhaps some awareness of the wayin which the new “transparency” exac-erbates informational asymmetries andpower imbalances, serving as a form ofmarketplace discipline, might providestronger grounds for a critique of theproliferation of corporate surveillance.Such a critique might also help chal-lenge the promotion of interactive tech-nologies (and the forms of consump-tion and production they facilitate) asinherently democratic and empower-ing. This essay seeks to provide onestarting point for such a challenge byexploring how the promise of interac-tivity functions as an invitation to en-gage in the work of being watched.The remaining sections of the essaytrace the development of the produc-tive role of surveillance from its deploy-ment in the workplace to its extensioninto the realm of online consumption,drawing on the example of interactiveTV, especially TiVo, to illustrate theimportance of interactive media to therationalization of e-commerce.

Productive Surveillance

The productivity of surveillance, forthe purposes of this article, can beunderstood as being always parasiticupon another form of labor. For ex-

ample, Braverman’s (1974) discussionof the pioneering work of FrederickTaylor in developing a system of work-place rationalization in the late 19th

and early 20th centuries highlights thereliance of what Taylor called “scien-tific management” upon comprehen-sive forms of workplace monitoring.Taylor’s description of how he suc-ceeded in dramatically increasing theproductivity of steel workers starts offwith a description of the role of surveil-lance in deciding which workers wouldbe targeted. Managers observed theentire workforce for four days beforechoosing several workers upon whomto focus their efforts: “A careful studywas then made of each of these men.We looked up their history as far backas practicable and thorough inquirieswere made as to the character, habits,and the ambition of each of them”(Taylor, as quoted in Braverman, 1974,p. 104). The selected worker’s trainingconsisted in his being supervised by amanager who observed his every ac-tion, timing him with a stopwatch, anddictating the laborer’s actions down tothe most specific detail. The result ofall this monitoring and managing wasthat the productivity of the day la-borer, whom Taylor refers to in hiscase study as “Schmidt,” almost qua-drupled. The activity of being watchedwasn’t productive on its own, butcoupled with another form of labor, ithelped multiply the latter’s productiv-ity. Over time, the recognition of theproductivity of surveillance helped toinstitutionalize the rationalization ofproduction based on ever more de-tailed forms of workplace monitoring,including Gilbreth’s famous time andmotion studies.

Among those who write about sur-veillance, Foucault (1975/1977; 1976/1978) has powerfully thematized its

233

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

productive aspect, which all too oftengets short shrift in the critical literatureon surveillance. For example, Gid-dens’s (1981) discussion of the policepower of the surveillance state, as wellas the various discussions of disciplin-ary surveillance offered by Norris andArmstrong (1999), Lyon (1994), andGandy (1993), retain strong overtonesof what Foucault describes as the insis-tence in the West on “seeing the powerit exercises as juridical and negativerather than technical and positive”(1980, p. 121). This tendency is alsoreflected in the public debate over on-line privacy, which centers on the “in-vasion” of privacy and the oppressivesurveillance capacity of the state. Theemphasis is upon the ways in whichdisciplinary surveillance creates “doc-ile bodies” and not upon the moresuggestive aspect of Foucault’s analy-sis: the spiraling cycle of productivityincited by disciplinary regimes: the factthat docile bodies are not renderedinert, but stimulated. As Foucault putsit in Discipline and Punish (1975/1977):“Let us say that discipline is the unitarytechnique by which the body is re-duced as a ‘political’ force at the leastcost and maximized as a useful force”(p. 221). Docility and pacification arecertainly among the goals of discipline,but the real power of surveillance is arelentlessly productive and stimulatingone:

The Panopticon . . . has a role of amplifica-tion; although it arranges power, althoughit is intended to make it more economicand effective, it does so not for poweritself . . . its aim is to strengthen the socialforces—to increase production, to developthe economy . . . to increase and multiply.(1977, p. 208)

This power—and not the sterile juridi-cal “repressive” gaze of Big Brother—is

what attracts the interest and the capi-tal of the online economy.

In contemporary terms, productivedisciplinary power stimulates the pro-liferation of desiring subjectivitiesthrough the multiplication of consump-tion categories: the endless sub-catego-rization and specification of individual-ized sets of tastes and preferences.Recording and measuring, specifyingand naming, these are the currentwatchwords of the marketing industry,which doesn’t “set boundaries” for con-sumption, but extends its various forms,“pursuing them to lines of indefinitepenetration” (Foucault 1976/1978, p.47). For example, the proponents ofmass customization (Negroponte, 1995;Pine, 1993; Gates 1996) imagine thepossibilities of specifying desire evermore narrowly based not just on con-sumers’ past preferences and socio-economic backgrounds, but on the de-tails of the moment: location, the timeof day, the weather. As in the case ofsexuality, the elaboration and prolif-eration of desire is achieved throughsubjection to a discursive regime ofself-disclosure whose contemporarycultural manifestations include not justthe mania for interactivity, but the con-fessional culture of a talk show nation,and, most recently, the ethos of willingsubmission to comprehensive surveil-lance associated with the booming real-ity TV trend.

The power of Foucault’s approach isthat it extends its consideration of theproductive role of panoptic surveil-lance beyond the realm of the work-place. The accumulation of bodies—their organization and deployment notjust within the factory walls, but in the“privacy” of homes and bedrooms—is anecessary corollary to the accumula-tion of capital (and vice versa). As Fou-cault puts it, capitalism “would not be

234


possible without the controlled inser-tion of bodies into the machinery ofproduction and the adjustment of thephenomena of population to economicprocesses” (1975/1977, p. 141). Disci-plinary surveillance does not just under-write subjection to the proliferation ofdesire, it also—and not incidentally—enhances economic productivity.

Foucault’s account of the productiverole of desire thus provides a usefulrejoinder to those who engage in whatSchiller (1988) describes as a “Si-syphean attempt to distinguish produc-tive from unproductive labor in termsof a hypostasized set of productive ac-tivities” (p. 36). The informationeconomy—including that designed tostimulate consumption via the accumu-lation, manipulation, and deploymentof information derived from consumersurveillance—is economically produc-tive, and the labor associated with itcan be identified by its status as a value-generating activity. The stimulation andrationalization of consumer desire is apractical corollary to the rationaliza-tion of production proper. As Harvey(1999), following Marx, puts it, “pro-duction and consumption relate to eachother so that ‘each of them creates theother in completing itself, and createsitself as the other’ ” (p. 80). For ex-ample, as historians, marketers, andsocial critics alike have recognized(Marchand, 1985; Sloan, 1963; Robins& Webster, 1999), the development ofconsumer society required techniquesfor stimulating consumption to keeppace with the increasing volume andvariety of products made available bythe technological and managerial ad-vances associated with the industrialrevolution. These techniques went farbeyond management of the workplaceproper, and relied upon detailed moni-toring of consumer habits and life-

styles. Gathering this information wasthe work of market researchers andadvertisers—work that is becoming in-creasingly important in the era of nichemarkets and customized products andservices. Interactive technologies, as thebusiness world has come to recognize(Mougayar, 1998), allow for much ofthis work to be offloaded onto consum-ers, who increasingly provide detailedinformation about themselves as theyconsume. The economic value of thisinformation means not just that it canbe bought and sold, but that consum-ers are often compensated for theirparticipation in producing it.

Rationalizing the Workof Watching

Jhally and Livant (1986) describeanother form of labor for which con-sumers are “paid”: the work of watch-ing. Building on their approach, thissection takes the argument a step fur-ther by exploring the way in which thework of being watched contributes to therationalization of the work of watch-ing. Jhally and Livant’s analysis isstraightforward: audiences performwork by viewing advertising in ex-change for “payment” in the form ofprogramming content. The viewing ofadvertising is productive because ithelps “speed up the selling of commodi-ties, their circulation from productionto consumption. . . . Through advertis-ing, the rapid consumption of com-modities cuts down on circulation andstorage costs for industrial capital” (p.125). In these terms, watching advertis-ing might be understood as an activityin which, as Harvey (1999) puts it, theprocess of consumption completes it-self in the process of production.

For the purposes of a considerationof the labor of being watched, the cru-

235

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

cial point made by Jhally and Livant(1986) is that the goal of media manage-ment is to rationalize the work of watch-ing—to “make the audience watchharder” (p. 133), just as Taylor madeSchmidt quadruple his daily productiv-ity. One strategy for rationalization isniche marketing, which Jhally and Li-vant describe as “the specification andfractionation of the audience” that leadsto “a form of ‘concentrated viewing’ inwhich there is (from the point of viewof advertisers) little wasted watching”(p. 133). As in the case of Schmidt,what is needed is detailed informationabout the audience labor force: both itsbackground and its behavior. The com-modification of this information hasalready been institutionalized as thesecondary market in ratings, whosegrowth accompanied that of the elec-tronic mass media. The labor of beingwatched goes hand-in-hand with thework of watching: viewers are moni-tored so advertisers can be ensuredthat this work is being done as effi-ciently as possible. Ratings, in this con-text, are informational commoditiesthat generate value because they helpto rationalize the viewing process. Theybecome what Mosco (1996), followingMeehan, describes as “cybernetic”commodities: “feedback” commodi-ties produced through consumption orinteraction (p. 151).

Within the context of the mass me-dia, the labor of being watched facedcertain limitations, both structural andcultural. Watching advertising may bea form of work, according to Jhally andLivant, but it does not take place withina centralized space that would allowbroadcasters to stand over viewers witha stopwatch, as in the case of the scien-tific management of the factory laborforce. Indeed, a certain expectation ofprivacy outside the workplace is one of

the hurdles that those who would ratio-nalize the work of being watched needto overcome. The fact that we acceptsurveillance more readily in the work-place is a function of the characteristicspatio-temporal differentiation associ-ated with wage labor in modernity,according to Giddens (1981): “Two op-posed modes of time-consciousness,‘working time’ and ‘one’s own’ or ‘freetime’, become basic divisions withinthe phenomenal experience of the day”(p. 137). Surveillance, within thisschema, is associated with time that isnot free, but which is subject to theasymmetrical power relations of theworkplace, underwritten by the work-ers’ subordination to those who con-trol the space of production.

The productive potential of the la-bor of being watched is further limitedby the structure of the mass media,which are only capable of exploitingthe logic of market fractionation up toa point. It is desirable to isolate anaffluent demographic, but to continueto subdivide the audience beyond acertain point would be counter-produc-tive, not least because the existing tech-nology is not well-suited to individual-ized programming. At the same time,detailed monitoring has tended to berelatively costly and has relied to alarge extent on the consent of the moni-tored. Thus, the television industry has,until recently, contented itself with therelatively small sample offered by theNielsen ratings, rather than attemptingmore detailed and comprehensive ap-proaches to managing the work ofwatching. However, the advent of inter-active, networked forms of content de-livery promises to overcome theselimitations and to develop the poten-tial of the work of being watched to itsfullest.

236


Interactive Surveillance inthe Digital Enclosure

The emerging model of the on-lineeconomy is explicitly based on the strat-egy for rationalizing and discipliningthe labor of viewing—and of consump-tion in general—so as to make it moreproductive. The goal is to replace massmarketing and production with custom-ized programming, products, and mar-keting. In the business literature (Mou-gayar, 1998; Pine, 1993), this paradigmis described as “mass customization”:the ability to produce mass quantitiesof products that are, at the same time,custom-tailored to niche markets and,at the extreme, to specific individuals.Described as the advent of flexibleproduction in response to increasinglyvolatile market conditions, mass cus-tomization represents the enhancedcapacity of interactive technology toexploit the productive potential of mar-ket segmentation. Viewed as a strategyfor promoting consumption, nichemarketing is not a demand-driven phe-nomenon, instigated by the sudden,inexplicable volatility of consumer pref-erences, but rather, as Harvey (1990)suggests, a supply-side response to thesaturation of the mass market.

In the media market, as well as inother segments of the economy, thepromise of interactive communicationtechnologies is to surpass the structurallimitations that prevented the exploita-tion of increasingly compact marketniches. If the advent of cable televisionallowed for market segmentation up toa point, the development of digital de-livery allows for its extension down tothe level of the individual viewer. BillGates (1996), for example, anticipatesa world in which not just the timingand choice of programs will be custom-ized, but in which the content and theadvertising can be adapted to viewer

preferences, allowing individuals tochoose the type of ending they want,the setting of the movie, and even thestars (who can be “customized” thanksto digitization). Similarly, customizedadvertising would ensure that every adis tailored to the demographics of itsrecipient. A similar logic could be ex-tended to products other than mediaprogramming. For example, computer-ization, according to Gates (1996), willallow “Increasing numbers of prod-ucts—from shoes to chairs, from news-papers and magazines to music al-bums” to be “created on the spot tomatch the exact specifications of a par-ticular person” (p. 188). Half a decadeafter Gates made these predictions,Wired magazine, in its April, 2001“Megatrends” issue declared “personalfabrication on demand” to be one ofthe top emerging trends of the newmillennium (p. 172).

The attempt to develop increasinglycustomized programming and prod-ucts foregrounds the economic impor-tance of what might be described asthe 21st century digital confessional: anincitement to self-disclosure as a formof self-expression and individuation.Interactive (cybernetic) media pro-mote this self-disclosure insofar as theyoffer the potential to integrate the la-bor of watching with that of beingwatched. The cybernetic economy thusanticipates the productivity of a digitalform of disciplinary panopticism, predi-cated not just on the monitoring gaze,but on the vast array of digital datamade available by interactive and con-vergent communication technologies.

The accumulation of detailed demo-graphic information allows not onlyfor the customization of products andprogramming, but also for customizedpricing. Whereas mass production wasreliant on the aggregation of individual

237

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

demand curves, customization allowsfor the dis-aggregation of demandcurves, and thus for the possibility thatproducers can extract some of the “sur-plus” previously realized by consum-ers. Amazon.Com’s recent experimentsin “variable pricing” anticipated thisdis-aggregation by attempting to chargecustomers different prices for the sameproduct, based on demographic infor-mation gleaned on-line from purchas-ers’ “cookies” (Grossman, 2000).

Digital Enclosure

The current deployment of the Inter-net for e-commerce may be viewed asan attempt to achieve in the realm ofconsumption what the enclosure move-ment achieved in the realm of produc-tion: an inducement to enter into arelationship of surveillance-based ratio-nalization. The process of digital enclo-sure can be defined, in these terms, asthe process whereby activities for-merly carried out beyond the monitor-ing capacity of the Internet are en-folded into its virtual space. The processis still very much in its early stages, butis heavily underwritten by investmentsin new media technologies (Schiller,1999) and by the enthusiastic andbreathless predictions of cyber-futur-ists that continue to make their wayinto the mass media. Lester (2001) notesthat entrance into what I call the digitalenclosure is often voluntary (at least forthe moment), but he coins an interest-ing term to suggest that consumers arecompelled to go on-line for an increas-ing array of transactions by “the tyr-anny of convenience” (p. 28). The cur-rent trend suggests that over time,alternatives to this “tyranny” may beincreasingly foreclosed. The result isthat consumption and leisure behav-iors will increasingly migrate into vir-

tual spaces where they can double as aform of commodity-generating labor.If the latest work of a popular author ormusical group is available only on-line,consumers are compelled to enter avirtual space within which very de-tailed forms of surveillance can takeplace. Electronic databases can keeptrack not only of who is reading orlistening to what, but when and where.

The exploitation of the labor of be-ing watched is thus crucially reliantupon public acceptance of the penetra-tion of digital surveillance into therealm of “free” time. That this accep-tance may not be immediately forth-coming is reflected in surveys like the1999 Wall Street Journal-NBC poll citedby Lester (2001) for its finding that“privacy is the issue that concernsAmericans most about the twenty-firstcentury, ahead of overpopulation, ra-cial tensions, and global warming” (p.27). Lawmakers have recognized theimportance to the digital economy ofassuaging these concerns and are at-tempting to pass legislation to ensureconsumers a certain degree of “privacyprotection” (Labaton, 2000, p. A1). Theproblem with such legislation from abusiness standpoint, and perhaps oneof the reason it tends to get boggeddown in committees, is that it threatensto dry up the flow of surveillance-generated information that is the life-blood of the economy it ostensibly en-ables.

The more promising approach, froma corporate perspective, has been toattempt to reposition surveillance as aform of consumer control. The popu-lar reception of the Internet as a meansof democratizing mediated interactionand surpassing the one-way, top-downmass media certainly works in favor ofthis attempt. Thus, the claims of thecyber-celebrants, such as George Gild-

238


er’s (1994) oft-cited prediction that “Theforce of microelectronics will blowapart all the monopolies, hierarchies,pyramids, and power grids of estab-lished industrial society” (p. 180) lineup neatly with the corporate promisethat the interactive digital market is “acustomer’s paradise,” presumably be-cause the “customer is in control”(Mougayar, 1998, p. 176). Casting thenet slightly wider, it is worth investigat-ing the extent to which the celebrationof the progressive potential of interac-tivity in some strands of media theoryhelps to promote the advantages ofentry into the digital enclosure. Themore we view this enclosure as a sitefor the potential revitalization of com-munity (Rheingold, 1993) and democ-racy (Brady, 1998; Kellner, 1999), themore inviting it appears. Similarly, asRobins and Webster (1999) suggest,the celebration of the information ageas a post-industrial resolution to thedepredations of industrial society helpsbackground the fundamental continu-ity of the “information era” with theexploitative relations of industrial capi-talism. My intent is not to dismiss theprogressive potential of interactive me-dia outright, but rather to note howneatly their uncritical promotion linesup with the interests of those whowould deploy the interactive capabilityof new media to exploit the work ofbeing watched.

In short, the promise of the “revolu-tionary” potential of new media bearsa marked similarly to the deploymentof the supposedly subversive potentialof sex that Foucault (1976/1978) out-lines in his discussion of the “repres-sive hypothesis.” When, for example,the New York Times informs its readersthat the advent of interactive digitaltelevision is “the beginning of the endof another socialistic force in Ameri-

can life: the mass market” (Lewis,2000), it contributes to the deploymentof what might be called “the mass soci-ety repressive hypothesis.” The latterunderwrites the ostensibly subversivepotential of interactivity even as itstimulates the productivity of con-sumer labor. The most familiar versionof this hypothesis suggests that massproduction worked to stifle the formsof individuation and self-expressionthat will be fostered in the upcomingdigital revolution: that the incitementto divulge our consumption-related be-havior (and what else is there, from amarketing perspective?) paradoxicallyrepresents a subversion of the totalitar-ian, homogenizing forces of the massmarket. As in the case of the deploy-ment of the repressive hypothesis, thepromised subversion turns out to be anincitement to multiply the very formsof self-disclosure that serve the disci-plinary regime they purportedly sub-vert. As Marchand (1985) suggests, thepromise of individuation—of the self-overcoming of mass homogeneity—was a strategy of the regime of masssociety from its inception. Mass society’sostensible self-overcoming becomes aruse for the incitement to self-disclo-sure crucial to the rationalization ofwhat undoubtedly remains a form ofmass consumption.

The Example of TiVo

Recent developments in televisiontechnology can perhaps provide a moreconcrete example of how the work ofbeing watched is deployed to rational-ize the work of watching. The emer-gence of digital VCR technology, in-cluding TiVo, ReplayTV, andMicrosoft’s Ultimate TV, anticipatesthe way in which the digital enclosureovercomes the limitations of the mass

239

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

media while enhancing their productiv-ity. The rudimentary data generatedby Nielsen Media Research, based ona sample of some 5,000 homes, mayhave been good enough for the stan-dardized advertising fare offered bypre-interactive television, but it clearlycannot provide the information neces-sary to custom-tailor advertising to the105 million households with televisionsets in the United States. As DarylSimm, the former head of worldwidemedia programming for Procter &Gamble, and the current head of me-dia at the Omnicom conglomerate re-cently put it,

The measurement we use today is verycrude. . . . It’s an average measurement ofthe number of viewers watching an indi-vidual program that does not even mea-sure the commercial break. When youthink about improvements in measuringviewing habits, you think not about incre-mental changes but great leaps. (Lewis,2000, p. 41)

The developers of digital VCR tech-nology are looking to make that leap.For home viewers, digital VCRs offerseveral advantages over their analogancestors: they can record severalshows at the same time; they storedozens of hours of programming whichcan be retrieved at a moment’s notice;and they automatically record pro-grams in response to keyword re-quests. From the advertisers’ perspec-tive, digital VCRs offer a highlydetailed form of demographic monitor-ing. As a rather celebratory piece aboutTiVo in The New York Times put it,

While the viewer watched television, thebox would watch the viewer. It wouldrecord the owner’s viewing habits in a waythat TV viewing habits have never beenrecorded. . . . Over time, the box wouldcome to know what the viewer liked maybe

even better than the viewer himself. (Lewis,2000, p. 38)

Even as it retrieves programming forviewers, the digital VCR doubles as amonitoring device in the service of thesystem’s operators, creating a detailed“time and motion study” of viewinghabits that can be sold to advertisersand producers. In the panoptic regis-ter, the digital VCR becomes an auto-mated consumption confessional: anincitement to divulge the most inti-mate details of one’s viewing habits.

In this respect, the digital VCR rep-resents a preliminary attempt to bringthe activity of television viewing withinthe monitoring reach of the digital en-closure. The enticement to consumersis that of convenience and customiza-tion (perhaps even self-expression). AsLewis (2000) puts it, “Over time, theviewer would create, in essence, hisown private television channel, storedon a hard drive in the black box, tai-lored with great precision to his inter-ests” (p. 38). There is a degree of truthto the claim of convenience: deviceslike TiVo will allow viewers to moreeasily store and record those programsthey want to watch. This is, perhaps,the compensation viewers receive inexchange for providing detailed infor-mation about their viewing habits. Theywill also be able to skip through com-mercials in 30-second intervals, but thisadvantage is being rendered obsoleteby the integration of advertising con-tent into the program itself (Elliott,2000).

Drawing on the promotional strat-egy of the digital economy, celebrantsof the new technology have adoptedthe “revolutionary” promise that newmedia will transfer control to viewersand consumers as a means of promot-ing their products. One of the earlyadvertising spots for TiVo, for ex-

240


ample, featured two bouncers throw-ing a network executive through hisplate glass window, enacting the de-throning of centralized corporate con-trol. This image corresponds with thedescription in The New York Times ofTiVo as a challenge to the mass marketand top-down, centralized planning.According to this account, whenviewed through the lens of the new“freedom” that TiVo ostensibly offersconsumers, “The entire history of com-mercial television suddenly appears tohave been a Stalinist plot erected, as ithas been, on force from above ratherthan choice from below” (Lewis, 2000,p. 41). This retelling of history pro-motes interactive technologies as onemore force bringing about what Sha-piro (1999) calls “the control revolu-tion,” whereby “new technology is al-lowing individuals to take power fromlarge institutions such as government,corporations, and the media. To anunprecedented degree, we can decidewhat news and information we’re ex-posed to” (p. xi).

Disturbingly, this perspective is notunique to mainstream news outlets andbusiness-oriented futurism, as evi-denced by the fact that Adbusters, the“hip,” alternative magazine of mediacriticism and culture jamming, hailedTiVo as a technology that “struck truefear into the hearts of the transnationalbosses,” because it “sticks it to everybroadcast advertiser” (Flood, 2001, p.17). The Adbusters article goes on toclaim that TiVo is among those new-media technologies that herald “some-thing revolutionary. Something almostpurely democratic. Something essen-tially non-commercial, driven not byprice but by value. At long last, thepeople—could it be true?—would havecontrol of what they wanted to hearand see” (2001, p. 17). In this portrayal

of the revolutionary promise of thenew technology, the champions of sub-versive chic close ranks with their os-tensible foes: neo-liberal propagan-dists like Wriston (1992) and Gilder(1994).

Perhaps not surprisingly—given theanticipated role of TiVo in allowing forcomprehensive demographic monitor-ing—the “transnational bosses” aren’tquivering in their boots. Rather, theyhave been investing whole-heartedlyin the technology that will purportedlyundermine their fiefdom. In 1999, TimeWarner, Disney, NBC and CBS in-vested a combined total of more than$100 million in digital VCR technol-ogy (Lewis, 2000, pp. 40–41). Eitherthe prognosticators of democraticutopia are overly optimistic or the“transnational bosses” of industry areworking overtime against their owninterests. History, combined with themarket potential of interactive monitor-ing, tends to side with the bosses againstthe revolutionary promise. This ten-dency is not inherent in the technologyitself, which, as Lessig (1999) pointsout, lends itself to diverse uses depend-ing on how it is configured and de-ployed. Rather it is a reflection of theimperatives of the decisions we makeabout how to use those technologiesand upon the pressures exerted bythose in a position to develop andimplement the Internet of the future.The increasing privatization of the net-work infrastructure combined with therecent spate of merger activity de-signed to exploit the commercial po-tential of the Internet suggests thoseapplications that promise to be com-mercially successful (economicallyprofitable) will likely take top priority.

All of which should come as no sur-prise to those familiar with the historyof electronic media in the United

241

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

States—a history that has largely beenthe story of technological develop-ments adapted to commercial ends.Often, as the critical history compiledby Solomon and McChesney (1993)suggests, this story has followed a pat-tern whereby non-commercial andcommunity-oriented uses are displacedby commercial applications as the me-dium is developed over time. Despitethe claims of those who herald thesubversive potential of the Internet—whether in the realm of theory or popu-lar culture—there is little evidence tosuggest the Internet will enact a radicaldeparture from this pattern. On thecontrary, applications originally her-alded as subversive of centralized cor-porate control, such as Napster andFreenet, are already being tailored toserve commercial purposes. If it is notdifficult to imagine how interactive me-dia could help promote more demo-cratic forms of mediated communica-tion, it is even easier to envision theirrole in allowing for ever more sophisti-cated techniques for the exploitation ofthe work of being watched.

Whether or not TiVo and its com-petitors are ultimately successful, theyare helping to forge the commercialparadigm of interactive media as ameans of inducing viewers to watchmore efficiently. Subscribers to TiVo—or to the next generation of interactivetelevision—will help lead the way into adigital enclosure wherein the work ofwatching can be as closely monitoredas was the manual labor overseen byFrederick Taylor. The compilation ofdetailed demographic profiles of view-ers will be facilitated by computer stor-age and retrieval techniques so as toensure “wasted” watching will be keptto a minimum. The celebrants of masscustomization envision this will takeplace in two ways: first, advertising will

be tailored to match the demographicsof each household and, eventually, ofindividual viewers; second, the line be-tween content and advertising will con-tinue to blur to the point of extinction.

If, as Gates (1996) suggests, everyitem of clothing, every location, andevery product in a television show can—within the context of an interactivemedium—double as both an advertis-ing appeal and a clickable purchasepoint, all viewing counts as work in thesense outlined by Jhally and Livant(1986). Indeed, all activity of virtuallyany kind that can be monitored withinthis enclosure becomes work, as in theexample of Mitch Maddox’s DotCom-pound. In the case of interactive televi-sion, the added convenience of cus-tomization may well work to maximizenot just the relative time devoted to thework of watching, but overall viewingtime. The Replay Corporation has al-ready found that “its customers watch,on average, three hours more televi-sion each week than they did beforethey got the box” (Lewis, 2000, p. 40).

The model of interactive televisionis generalizable to an increasing vari-ety of activities that take place withinthe digital enclosure—and, to the extentthat monitoring is involved, more andmore activities seem to fall under theumbrella of consumption. The work ofbeing watched can, in other words,help to rationalize the entire spectrumof consumption-related activities thathave traditionally taken place beyondthe monitoring gaze of the workplace.The general outlines of a commercialmodel for interactive media can thusbe gleaned from the example of TiVo.Its main components are: customiza-tion (the disaggregation of demandcurves, the direct linkage between aspecific act of production and a tar-geted act of consumption), interactivity

242


(the ability to monitor consumers inthe act of consumption), off-loadinglabor to consumers (who perform thework of generating their own demo-graphic information), and the develop-ment of an on-going relationship withconsumers (that allows for the exploita-tion of demographic information gath-ered over time).

Perhaps not surprisingly, several ele-ments of this business model can bediscerned in the development of a re-cent, supposedly subversive mediatechnology: that of the music file-sharing utility Napster. As Wired maga-zine recently noted in a short aside toits celebratory coverage of the revolu-tionary potential of “peer-to-peer” net-working, Napster represents a forward-looking business model for the on-lineeconomy: “the system keeps customerrelationships in-house, but outsourcesthe lion’s share of infrastructure backto a captive audience. It’s . . . clear thata better music-industry strategy wouldbe not to ban Napster’s technology,but to make it their own” (Kuptz, 2000,p. 236). The German publishing giantBertelsmann, with a major presence inthe recording industry, clearly agrees,as evidenced by its decision to enterinto a partnership with Napster. Thisarrangement should not be viewed asan aberration or a “sellout” on the partof Napster—whose ostensible assault onthe record industry was not a subver-sion of market logic per se, but onemore example of the “creative destruc-tion” that Schumpeter (1947) famouslyattributed to the process of capitalistdevelopment: the replacement of anolder business paradigm by a newerone.

Like TiVo, Napster-style technologyallows for the comprehensive docu-mentation of on-line consumption: itenables not only the monitoring of mu-

sic selections downloaded by users, but,potentially, the retrieval of their entireon-line music inventory. It may welloffer companies like Bertelsmann theability to peer into subscribers’ virtualCD-cabinets and eventually to cata-logue their actual listening habits inorder to market to them more effec-tively. Just as TiVo offloads the work ofmarket research to consumers who addto their profile of preferences with ev-ery program they select, Napster poten-tially offloads this work to users whoshare files on-line. Moreover, as theWired article notes, the Napster modelalso offloads infrastructure to consum-ers, whose home computers becomethe repository for the music files tradedon-line. Napster technology makes pos-sible the future envisioned by Gates(1996), wherein subscribers will be ableto download music to portable digitaldevices and to pay according to howoften they plan to listen to an indi-vidual track. In this respect the futureof online music and television deliveryenvisioned by the industry representsthe application of mediated interactiv-ity to the emerging paradigm of surveil-lance-based customization. The resultis the promise that consumers will beable to perform the work of beingwatched with even greater efficiency.

Conclusion

Rumors of the death of privacy inthe 21st century have been greatly exag-gerated. The increasingly importantrole of on-line surveillance in the digi-tal economy should be construed notas the disappearance of privacy per se,but as a shift in control over personalinformation from individuals to privatecorporations. The information in ques-tion—behavioral habits, consumptionpreferences, and so on—is emphatically

243

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

not being publicized. It is, rather, be-ing aggregated into proprietary com-modities, whose economic value is de-pendent, at least in part, upon the factthat they are privately owned. Suchcommodities are integral to the exploi-tation of customized markets and theadministration of the “flexible” modeof production associated with mass cus-tomization. Making markets more effi-cient, according to this model, meanssurpassing the paradigm of the massmarket and its associated inefficien-cies, including the cost of gatheringdemographic information, of storinginventory, and of attempting to sell amass-produced product at a standard-ized price. Interactive media com-bined with the development of com-puter memory and processing speedallow for the comprehensive forms ofsurveillance crucial to the scientificmanagement of consumption withinthe digital enclosure.

Like the factory workers of the early20th century, the consumers of the early21st century will be subjected to moresophisticated monitoring techniquesand their attendant forms of produc-tive discipline. The intended result isthe stimulation of the forces of con-sumption—the indirect complement ofthe enhanced productivity associatedwith network technology. If the effortexpended in shopping feels more andmore like labor, if we find ourselvesnegotiating ever more complex sets ofchoices that require more sophisti-cated forms of technological literacy,the digital economy is poised to har-ness the productive power of that laborthrough the potential of interactivity.

At the same time, it is worth point-ing out the potentially productive con-tradiction at the heart of the promise ofthe digital “revolution”. If indeed itspromise is predicated on the subver-

sion of the very forms of market con-trol it serves, this promise invokes amoment of critique. This is the flip sideof Foucault’s assertion of the subject asthe site of the reiteration of conditionsof power. It is the critical momentheralded by Butler’s (1997) assertionthat “Where conditions of subordina-tion make possible the assumption ofpower, the power assumed remains tiedto those conditions, but in an ambiva-lent way” (p. 13). Subjection/subjectifi-cation suggests that the conditions ofpower are not reproduced “automati-cally” but can be contested by the veryforms of subjectivity they produce.From this perspective, it is telling thatin the celebratory discourse of the digi-tal revolution, centralized forms of mar-ket control are re-presented as homolo-gous with their former opponent:totalitarian, centralized planning. In-triguing avenues for resistance open upin an era when the New York Times canliken the television network system toStalinism. Such critiques might do wellto start with the premises appealed toby the digital revolution: that there is aneed for greater shared control of theeconomic and political processes thatshape our lives in an age of seeminglydramatic technological transformation.Even if the promise of interactivity as aform of de-centralization and sharedcontrol fails to be realized (as is sug-gested by the flurry of record-breakingmerger activity in recent years), its im-plicit assessment of the shortcomingsof mass society serves as a potentialpurchase point for a critique of thevery rationalization it enables. In thisrespect, the realization that the prom-ise of interactivity bases its appeal onperceived forms of exploitation (thatought to be overcome) lines up withFoucault’s observation that where there

244


is power, there is also, always, the po-tential for resistance.

Of central interest from a criticalperspective, therefore, is the extent towhich the marketers of the digital revo-lution continue to base its appeal uponthe interpellation of an “active,” em-powered consumer. As consumers startto realize that their activity feels morelike labor (filling out online surveys,taking the time to “design” customizedproducts and services) and less likeempowerment, it is likely that the ex-plicit appeal to shared control will bereplaced by the emerging trend towardautomated, autonomous forms of “con-venient” monitoring. This is the direc-tion anticipated by futurists like Negro-ponte (1995) and the planners behindthe MIT “Project Oxygen,” whose goalis to make computers as invisible andubiquitous as air. Their approach rep-resents a retreat from the version of the“active” consumer associated with ex-plicitly participatory forms of data gath-ering that characterized some of theearly experiments in interactivity (the“design your own sneaker” or “write areview of this book” approach). In-stead, the goal is the proliferation of anincreasingly invisible, automated, andautonomous network. The agency ofthe active consumer is displaced ontowhat Negroponte (1995) calls “the digi-tal butler.” Interactivity will likely beincreasingly reformulated as inter-pas-sivity insofar as the goal is to make themonitoring process as unobtrusive aspossible. The call to “action” will bedisplaced onto the ubiquitous technol-ogy, whose autonomy is designed toreplace that of the consumer/viewer.Perhaps an early incarnation of thisunobtrusive form of monitoring is thebrowser “cookie.” Designed to increaseconvenience by allowing a site to re-member a particular visitor so that cus-

tomized settings don’t have to be recon-figured, the “cookie” doubles as adigital butler for marketers, providingdetailed browsing information aboutonline consumers. It is hard not toimagine that the same would be true ofother forms of digital butlers, whoseallegiance remains rather more am-biguous than Negroponte implies. Asthese services become increasingly in-visible and fade into the background,the increasingly monitored and trans-parent consumer comes to the fore.

In the face of the emergence of in-creasingly ubiquitous and invisibleforms of monitoring, the appeal to pri-vacy is often enlisted as a form ofresistance. This type of resistance isrendered problematic by the fact thatwhat is taking place—despite the recur-ring claim that the end of privacy isupon us—is the extensive appropriationof personal information. More informa-tion than ever before is being privat-ized as it is collected and aggregated sothat it can be re-sold as a commodity orincorporated into the development ofcustomized commodities. The enclo-sure and monopolization of this infor-mation reinforces power asymmetriesin two ways: by concentrating controlover the resources available for theproduction of subjects’ desires and de-siring subjects, and by the impositionof a comprehensive panoptic regime.The digital enclosure has the potentialto become what Giddens (1981), follow-ing Goffman, terms a “total institu-tion.” The good news, perhaps, is thatonce the red-herring of the “death” ofprivacy is debunked, the enclosure ofpersonal information can be properlyaddressed as a form of exploitationpredicated on unequal access to themeans of data collection, storage, andmanipulation. A discussion of surveil-lance might then be couched in terms

245

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

of conditions of power that compelentry into the digital enclosure andsubmission to comprehensive monitor-ing as a means of stimulating and ratio-nalizing consumption. The way inwhich the promise of participation isdeployed as an incentive to submit tothe work of being watched might befurther illuminated by the extension ofmodels of “concertive control” (Papa,Auwal, & Singh, 1997; Tompkins &Cheney, 1985) to the realm of con-sumer labor. Additionally, such a dis-cussion would necessarily address thequestions of who controls the means ofsurveillance and to what ends, how thispower is reproduced through subjec-tion to interactive monitoring, who ben-efits from the work of being watched,and who is compelled to surrendercontrol over personal information inexchange for a minimum “wage” of

convenience or customization. For toolong, the discussion of mediated inter-activity has tended to assume that aslong as the Internet allowed unfetteredinteractivity, questions of network con-trol and ownership were rendered mootby the revolutionary potential of thetechnology itself. Perhaps it is not toomuch to hope that an understanding ofthe relation of interactivity to disciplin-ary surveillance and, thus, to the laborof being watched might work to counterthe unwonted euphoria of the utopiancyber-determinists and to refocus thequestion of the fate of collective con-trol over personal information. Other-wise, we may all find ourselves toilingproductively away in the DotCom-pound, narrowcasting the rhythms ofour daily lives to an ever smaller andmore exclusive audience of privatecorporations. �

References

Bedell, D. (2000, March 2). FTC to survey e-commerce sites on how they use customers’ data. TheDallas Morning News, p. 1F.

Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Bryan, C. (1998). Electronic democracy and the civic networking movement. In R. Tsagarou-sianou, D. Tambini, & C. Bryan (Eds.), Cyberdemocracy: Technology, cities, and civic networks (pp.1–17). London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Choney, S. (2001, March 27). Juno may not charge, but it’s no free lunch. The San DiegoUnion-Tribune, p. 2.

Copeland, L. (2001, Jan. 3). For DotComGuy, the end of the online line. The Washington Post, p. C2.

Elliott, S. (2000, Oct. 13). TiVo teams up with the Omnicom Group to tell the world about digitalvideo recorder. The New York Times, p. C4.

Flood, H. (2001, March/April). Linux, TiVo, Napster . . . information wants to be free. You got aproblem with that? Adbusters, No. 34, 17.

Foucault, M. (1976/1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). NewYork: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1976/1978). The history of sexuality: An introduction (Vol. I) (R. Hurley, Trans.). NewYork: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). The Foucault reader ( P. Rabinow, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Gandy, O. (1993). The panoptic sort: A political economy of personal information. Boulder, CO:Westview.

Garfinkel, S. (2000). Database nation: The death of privacy in the 21st century. Cambridge: O’Reilly.

246


Gates, B. (1996). The road ahead. New York: Penguin.

Giddens, A. (1981). A contemporary critique of historical materialism. Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press.

Gilder, G. (1994). Life after television: The coming transformation of media and American life. New York:Norton.

Grossman, W. (2000, Oct. 26). Shock of the new for Amazon customers. The Daily Telegraph(London), p. 70.

Harvey, D. (1999). The limits to capital. London: Verso.

Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Jhally, S., & Livant, B. (1986). Watching as working: The valorization of audience consciousness.Journal of Communication, 36, 124–143.

Kellner, D. (1999). Globalisation from below? Toward a radical democratic technopolitics.Angelaki, 4, 101–111.

Kuptz, J. (2000, October). Independence array. Wired, 236–237.

Labaton, S. (2000, May 20). U.S. is said to seek new law to bolster privacy on Internet. New YorkTimes, p. A1.

Lessig, L. (1999). Code: And other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.

Lester, T. (2001, March). The reinvention of privacy. The Atlantic Monthly, 27–39.

Lewis, M. (2000, Aug. 13). Boombox. The New York Times Magazine, 36–67.

Lyon, D. (1994). The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. Minneapolis: University ofMinneapolis Press.

Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American dream: Making way for modernity, 1920–1940.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mosco, V. (1996). The political economy of communication. London: Sage.

Mougayar, W. (1998). Opening digital markets. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Norris, C., and Armstrong, G. (1999). The maximum surveillance society: The rise of CCTV. Oxford:Berg.

Papa, M. J., Auwal, M.A., & Singhal, A. (1997, September). Organizing for social change withinconcertive control systems: Member identification, empowerment, and the masking of disci-pline. Communication Monographs, 64, 219–249.

Pine, J. (1993). Mass customization: The new frontier in business competition. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Rheingold, H. (1993). Virtual community. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Robins, K., & Webster, F. (1999). Times of the technoculture: From the information society to the virtuallife. London: Routledge.

Rosen, J. (2000). The unwanted gaze: The destruction of privacy in America. New York: Random House.

Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Schiller, D. (1988). How to think about information. In V. Mosco & J. Wasko (Eds.), The PoliticalEconomy of Information (pp. 27–43). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Schumpeter, J. (1947). Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Shapiro, A. (1999). The control revolution: How the Internet is putting individuals in charge and changingthe world we know. New York: PublicAffairs.

Sloan, A. (1963). My years with General Motors. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

247

CSMC ANDREJEVIC

Smythe, D. (1981). Dependency road: Communications, capitalism, consciousness, and Canada. Toronto:Ablex.

Smythe, D. (1977). Communications: Blindspot of western Marxism. Canadian Journal of Politicaland Social Theory, 1, 1–27.

Tompkins, P.K., & Cheney, G. (1985). Communication and unobtrusive control in contemporaryorganizations. In R.D. McPhee & P.K. Tompkins (Eds.), Organizational communication: Tradi-tional themes and new directions (pp. 179–210). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Whitaker, R. (1999). The end of privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality. New York: NewPress.

Wriston, W. (1992). The twilight of sovereignty: How the information revolution is transforming our world.New York: Scribner.

Received April 25, 2001Accepted December 4, 2001

248


andrejevic (2002) - the work of being watched; interactive media and the exploitation of...

Documents