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Chapter 4: Mapping Profiles
Overview
[Computers] simulate surveillance in the sense that they precede and redouble the means of observation. Computer profiling . . . is understood best not just as a technology of surveillance, but as a kind of surveillance in advance of surveillance, a technology of ‘‘observation before the fact.’’ (Bogard 1996, 27)
Few would argue that the debate over postmodernity, and in particular the concept of simulation, has been dominated by the works of—and polemics surrounding—media and social theorist Jean Baudrillard. While clearly benefitting from the Baudrillardian oeuvre, William Bogard’s The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (1996) turns to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to discuss technological changes in the information economy. Focusing on questions of effect and process, Bogard investigates the dynamics of the cybernetic process or the means by which information systems reconstitute themselves. As is shown in chapter 2, Foucault is useful to the extent that he introduces the significance of a repressive, automated system of surveillance. Bogard (1996, 26) attempts to redress the limitations of such a model by insisting that simulations are ‘‘projected onto something.’’ Simulations are, in other words, a result of a particular diagnostic process that stresses the power of visualizing past, present, and possible future topographical relationships. For Bogard, bodies are consequently codified, and sites of confinement give way to a ubiquitous ‘‘society of control.’’
Whereas chapter 3 discusses the emerging networking capabilities of particular computer technologies over the course of the twentieth century, this chapter offers a more technical and systematic discussion of personal information. And where chapter 3 provides background about emerging technological innovations that automated consumer desires and opinions into a production, sales, and distribution loop, this chapter discusses the manner in which personal information is first collected and networked into computer systems and then cross-referenced, profiled, and continuously simulated in the form of computer maps. By focusing on the importance of geographic data and mapping technologies, this chapter critiques the architectural tendencies in Foucaultian studies of personal information. In so doing, the chapter offers an example of a diagrammatic system of production that attempts to map and henceforth govern consumers, markets, and spaces.[1]
Through a discussion of the modes and modulations of ‘‘data acquisition’’—the construction, diagnosis, and applicability of consumer databases—I again note that consumer ‘‘surveillance’’ is predicated on the active solicitation of personal information from individuals in exchange for the promise of some form of reward. Through the act of browsing, exchanging, requesting, and consuming, individual consumers actively assist in the reproduction of consumer markets. Yet this process does not start or stop with solicitation, automated or otherwise. Rather, consumer profiles are constructed through cross-referencing various categories of data (demographic, psychographic, geographic, and so on). Geocoding consumer databases, computer-simulated maps, and geographical information systems (GIS) can infinitely reproduce updated maps of markets, a process that increasingly facilitates the forecasting and governmentalization of the human, economic, and political topography.[1]For a bibliography of sources on the discriminatory effects of geographical information systems (GISs), see Jon Goss’s (1995) excellent discussion of GIS and direct marketing, political campaigns, and credit bureaus.
