Analysing everyday experiences of being surveilled
In the post below, Louise Eley and Ben Rampton reflect on their article, “Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
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How do people actually experience being surveilled in everyday life? And how can we capture, analyse, and differentiate such experiences? There has been a dearth of research in surveillance studies on everyday experiences of surveillance. But it’s important to ask and to answer these questions if we are to interrogate claims that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives, to distinguish between what people perceive as intrusive surveillance and mundane everyday surveillance (cf. Bigo 2017: 3), and to flag up unequal effects of surveillance across populations.
In our paper, ‘Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction’, we take Erving Goffman’s account of ‘unfocused interaction’ as our starting point. Unfocused interaction occurs between people who are physically co-present but engaged in separate activities, and it involves people performing a side-of-the-eye, half-an-ear monitoring of the people, objects, and events in the space around them. It also entails knowing you’re visible to others, styling your outward appearance to conform to the proprieties of the situation, and restricting intrusive gazes with ‘civil inattention’.
We show how ambient monitoring, senses of potential threat, and the styling of conduct in unfocused interaction link with experiences of surveillance, using Goffman’s concepts to analyse three scenes of surveillance from everyday life: a woman walking down a city street, two men putting up street stickers (a civil offence), and passengers being scanned at an airport (Pütz 2012). The analysis generates a differentiated account of the experience of surveillance across these scenes, illuminating practices through which the normality of surveillance is produced and maintained, as well as the ways in which sharper experiences of being surveilled are differently configured.
The forms of awareness, practices, and concerns involved in unfocused interaction are a fundamental aspect of our behaviour in social situations — we rely on them wherever we go. And by showing how they are embedded in the everyday enactment and experience of surveillance, we produce a view of surveillance as a basic mode of sociality, elaborated in different ways in different environments (cf. Green and Zurawski 2015). Indeed, Goffman’s framework has the potential to interrogate large-scale generalisations about the surveillance society, illuminating agentive responses to surveillance that are too subtle to be captured by notions like resistance.
Examining everyday lived experiences of being surveilled draws surveillance studies closer to fields like anthropology and sociolinguistics…, which focus on everyday interaction and situated practice in institutions and communities.
Examining everyday lived experiences of being surveilled draws surveillance studies closer to fields like anthropology and sociolinguistics (our own subdiscipline), which focus on everyday interaction and situated practice in institutions and communities. This is particularly the case if, as many suggest, surveillance is an interactional relationship between watcher and watched. Indeed, since 2017, we have been exploring these interdisciplinary links at LIEP, the Language (In)security & Everyday Practice Lab, a collaboration between sociolinguists and researchers in peace, conflict and security studies.
