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The Modulation of Information
With a decidedly topographical focus, this chapter responds to recent influential analyses of the information economy offered by the likes of Oscar Gandy and Mark Poster by operationalizing Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on power, space, and the diagram-as-map. Gandy and Poster—two seemingly radically incommensurate scholars—share a common affinity with the notion of ‘‘dataveillance’’ (the surveillance of a population through database technologies). Although Gandy and Poster offer compelling arguments based on their political, economic, and theoretical studies of consumer surveillance technologies, I discuss the segmentation and storage of consumer profiles in databases and argue that both authors downplay the significance of soliciting and map- ping consumer behavior.Contemporary discussions and debates over the nature of technological systems are not restricted to the academy. For example, some in the business sector have described the database as a ‘‘smart’’ technological apparatus ‘‘which drives an intelligence or learning process that provides information for marketing decision making.’’ ( Jackson & Wang 1994, 29). The language of architecture tends to appear in the growing body of literature on database technologies. David Martin (1991, 24), for instance, describes the process of formatting, accumulating, and coding data as drawing on ‘‘relational architectures.’’ But that language all too often stops short of a reflexive system of data production. In other words, such critiques fail to address the means by which information is consistently and repetitively updated and mapped via computer programs such as GIS, or they limit such assessments and diagnoses to the realm of the indexical (for example, as lists).
As previously mentioned, I would loosely classify such approaches under the heading ‘‘dataveillance,’’ as initially defined by computer scientist Roger A. Clarke (1994, 122–123):
[Dataveillance is] automated monitoring through computer readable data rather than physical observation. . . . Data- veillance is the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigating and monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.
Clarke’s contribution to the study of surveillance (and what distances his work from more literal-minded readings of panopticism) is his recognition of the dispersal of such technologies—their ability to survey behavior ‘‘from a distance.’’ Yet what remains at best unclear in Clarke’s discussion of dataveillance is the degree to which personal information relates to—indeed, fuels and regenerates—techniques and technologies that solicit, diagnose, store, and map personal information.Mark Poster’s (1990, 75) investigation of database technologies likewise privileges language over sight within the indexical architectures of the database. As a result, Poster (1990, 69) argues that in comparison to the example of television,
The database represents a somewhat different language situation. In this case the individual is not addressed at all; he or she receives no messages. Rather the communication goes the other way around. The individual, usually indirectly, sends messages to the database. In one sense the database is nothing more than a repository of messages.
Unfortunately, as is evidenced in this quotation, the process of soliciting and collecting information into databases is characterized by Poster as a one-way flow from the consumer to the database.
Perhaps Poster is being overly literal in his writing, arguing for a more rigid system of control where individuals have little to no agency.Consumer databases clearly do speak to individuals, often in the form of targeted solicitations. Everyday routines or interactions in a consumer society are also wrought with numerous technologies of solicitation (such as supermarket rebate-card ‘‘swipes,’’ credit-card transactions, and video rentals) that by design attempt to automate the solicitation of personal information in exchange for varying degrees and manifestations of reciprocity (including pleasure, cash discounts, and prizes). Dataveillance’s focus on the database has also in large part been technologically surpassed by the recent innovations in computer technology and telecommunications, manifested in increasingly interconnected computer systems—a veritable convergence of technologies that accumulate, code, and most important map personal information.
