Final Evaluation...

          This project began with the idea of surveillance, specifically surveillance within society driven by the idea of a Perth Panopticon.  Being completely honest and reflexive about my project, at the beginning of my research my mind seemed biased towards a discursive analysis of the phenomenon of surveillance, with Foucault’s notion of surveillance within society in mind; whereby Foucault builds on Jeremy Bentham’s mechanisms in the prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power.  The panopticon style of architecture may be used in other institutions with surveillance needs, such as: schools, factories or hospitals.  The ever-visible inmate, Foucault suggests, is always “the object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault 1995:202).

               

            My first photographs were taken to represent how things like a play park or leisure centre fit in with panopticism, however during the process of taking photos other elements within society caught my eye...

            During my research I was finding ever more evidence of a different type of surveillance, a hidden surveillance and during the process of viewing my first batch of images I realised that I had embarked on a process of finding threads within the topic of surveillance, following these and discovering more threads that eventually led to the discovery of repeated phenomenon and a variety of different, however related, hidden forms of surveillance.

    In this discovery I realised that I was in actual fact using a grounded theory approach and decided to just roll with it and clear my mind of any existing discourses and just really see what was out there.  I endeavoured on a process of the four stages advocated by Glaser & Strauss (1967), the founders of grounded theory and embarked on a process of abductive reasoning.   At first I stumbled upon access gates that required membership cards to pass through, this lead to the idea of access and the different types we are faced with and what we need to gain access (the divulging of our personal information), this led to access and membership cards containing all our information, then this led to cards in general: loyalty cards, membership cards, bank cards etc, all of which build a web of information that leaves traces of our lives in a hidden form of surveillance. In terms of hidden surveillance this led onto such things as smart phones and digital media and how we can all be traced through these, for example the new iphones have a built in GPS that cannot be turned off? GPS can be access by authorities at any time if they have just cause, however not many people I spoke to with smart phones were aware of this.

    This really is the gist of this project and this project concludes with the themes of Traces; Webs of Information and Hidden Surveillance as a jump off point to further explore and eventually develop a theory about.

    The weaknesses identified within this project firstly start with my own bias as a researcher and that if I had gone with my original plan I would really have been purposefully seeking out data that fit my theory.  The decision to use solely grounded theory I believe has produced something that would have undoubtedly been missed and the most fascinating thing about these hidden forms of surveillance that we all consent to, is that when I was taking further images of peoples wallets and purses and the amount of different loyalty and membership cards they possessed that leave all these traces of their lives and create a mass web of information regarding the individual, the people I asked to begin with were not keen on letting me take a photo of what they deemed to be private, their purses.  After taking the pictures I explain what I was doing and every person I talked to hadn’t realised just how many different things their purses contained that exposed what they deemed as private , their lives, their movements, their purchases – a picture of who they are, where they went, what they bought, and how often...

    This is what I now see as one of the major strengths of grounded theory that to step outside of the given frameworks of discourse is one of the most powerful tools to identify something that we didn’t yet know existed, to create a wholly new theory of something or just gain a different or untainted perspective of something; that may have been staring us in the face all along but we could not see it for the veil of prescribed discourses.

    In conclusion I really have to say I was pleasantly surprised by my findings and the discovery for me of an approach that can offer real objectivity to social phenomenon if utilised with discipline and objectivity by letting the data take you instead of you taking the data...

    Finally, the traces and webs of information left by these forms of hidden surveillance, how much are these traces and webs a construct of us and who we are, and how much of them are shaped by the influence of the power these cards have over us, louring us back to the same places with the promise of gain? Without these cards would the traces we leave be profoundly different?

       To return to Foucault's notion of surveillance, this form of surveillance is hidden or implicit but still manages to control how we act, in that it constructs the traces we leave by binding us to certain locations and places, thus controlling where we go and constructing our webs of information... 

REFERENCES

Foucault, Michel. (1995)  Discipline and Punishment. Vintage Books: New York

Glaser, B. G & Strauss, A. L (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Stratagies for Qualitative Research. Aldine Publishing Co: Chicago.

Visual Sociology:

A Comment on Validity and Reliability…

Firstly the terms Validity and Reliability must be defined: Reliability is the degree of consistency between two measures of the same thing (Mehrens & Lehman, 1987) and shows the measure of how stable, dependable, trustworthy, and consistent a test is in measuring the same thing each time (Worthen et al., 1993). Validity is related to truthfulness: Does the test measure what it purports to measure?; the extent to which certain inferences can be made from test scores or other measurement (Golafshani 2003:597; Mehrens & Lehman, 1987), and the degree to which they accomplish the purpose for which they are being used. (Worthen et al., 1993). 

There are several types of validity, concerning visual sociology and photography, content and construct validity would rate quite highly.  Content validity refers to the extent to which the content of a test's items represents the entire body of content to be measured. Context validity refers to abstract ideas that humans construct in their minds to help them explain observed patterns or differences in the behavior of themselves or other people or what they may observe (Davies & Dodds 2000:281).  A construct is an unobservable, postulated attribute of individuals created in our minds to help explain or theorise about human behavior. Since constructs do not exist outside the human mind, they are not directly measurable (Cresswell & Miller 2000:129). However in the vein of visual sociology and photography in general content and construct validity of images can be determined through reflexivity. So in conjunction with reflexivity, validity in this statement refers to what Prosser (1998) notes should be “interactive, dialectical, collaborative logic” (Prosser 1998:104). Thus reflexivity seeks to make explicit the process and functions involved in the production of visual data and their subsequent findings, in an attempt to produce validity and add reliability to the visual measure of images used for data (Chaplin 1994:1).

                

       So from this it can be seen that gaining these valued measures (by some) within this type of research is difficult and criticisms of this method mainly lie in the views that because of the nature or the equipment and close proximity involved in getting the data, this automatically alters social phenomenon, particularly behavior.  However, even within the hard sciences and social science the laboratory experiment can be said to have the same problematic criticisms. One the other side of the coin value judgments and personal (however sub-conscious) bias, along with an influential factor in selective knowledge can all have an effect and play a part in the creation of an image (Winston 2002:  ). So locating where the ‘self’ is in social practice, language and discourse is vitally important to the research process. This all falls back to the notion that reality is distorted by and for artistic reasons and this is true, however as in many other practices purpose must be separated and defined.  Using a camera does not automatically denote artistic pursuits…

Image-based Research has been argued to be more subjective and therefore less valid and reliable and more prone to manipulation than 'word-orientated' qualitative research. However, Prosser (1998) explains that this is certainly not the case, and that in fact both research types are confronted by the same issues(Prosser 1998:97-9).  As discussed above the laboratory experiment faces generalisation to the wider population issues and all research no matter if visual of written depend how the evidence is interpreted by the researcher, and there are always more than one way of seeing things not matter how objective the researcher aims to be.  Thus, the researcher conducting word based research – which depends on texts, interviews and various kinds of evidence – can look at a subject from various perspectives, selectivity here is produced by the choices the researcher makes when choosing which sources to use.  These different sources, all containing their own interpretations, contributing a variety of interpretations, which the researcher will then surmise their own. Perhaps the summarised conclusions of various written texts compared to a picture is more malleable in terms of interpretation? Regardless, the point being that visual methods can be as reliable and valid as any other type of method, using reflexivity to increase awareness and objectivity.  An important point to note is that a good piece of research depends wholly on the researcher choosing the most appropriate method to conduct it.

     The level of validity and reliability in image-based research can be effectively increased by using multiple visual data to provide evidence of repeated occurrences of social phenomenon, and a wide breadth of techniques to ensure an allowance of possible differing interpretations of a single phenomenon.  However, reliability will always be an issue in qualitative research society is not stable, and as culture evolves over time, so do ideas, customs and relationships (Winston 2000:66).

REFERENCES

Creswell, J. W. & Miller, D. L. (2000). Determining validity in qualitative inquiry. Theory into

Practice, 39(3), 124-131.

Davies, D., & Dodd, J. (2002). Qualitative research and the question of rigor. Qualitative Health

research, 12(2), 279-289.

Golafshani, N. (2003) Understanding Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. The Qualitative Report Volume 8 Number 4 December 2003 597-607

Mehrens, W. A. & Lehmann, I. J. (1987). Using standardized tests in education. New York: Longman.

Prossor, J (1998) Image Based Research: A Sourcebook for the Qualitative Researcher. Abington: RoutledgeFalmer.

Winston, B (2002) ‘The Camera Never Lies: The Prtiallity of Photographic Evidence’, in Image Based Research: A Sourcebook for the Qualitative Researcher. Ed, by Prosser, L. (1998) Abington: RoutledgeFalmer, 60-68.

Worthen, B. R., Borg, W. R., and White, K. R. (1993). Measurement and evaluation in the school. NY: Longman.

Track-able GPS...

Every time you log on to a computer it is logged against the I.P. address of your location, this is also traceable, not to mention the content you are browsing on the internet...

Other Forms of Surveillance...?

This picture needs to be retaken, however it is a web page that will not give you access to blogger unless you give them your mobile number...

Bar-coded items, such as books that are attached to memberships that contain all your personal details...

To use public computers we must sign in and leave our details and this is recorded and logged...

All of these occurrences are linked to some form of membership that alone or together create a web of information and details about your day to day...moment to moment movements....

Memberships that track what we eat, how we look after ourselves, how much we spend, where we spend it...even what we and if we recycle...

Not only is surveillance by sign...

but surveillance of what we recycle...

Via scanning of ever growing loyalty and club cards...

A membership of loyalty or surveillance...???

Visual Sociology:

A Comment on Photo Journalism...

Nicely put Becker (1986) states that the difference between Photo Journalism, Documentary Photography and Visual Sociology is how the image is received (Becker 1986, cited in Prosser 1998:84).

A photo journalist may construct a context to convey a particular message; a documentary photographer’s job is to document the reality of what is there.  However, Visual Sociology is capturing a series of images and events that can be collated to act as data where themes can be extracted and analysed.  Reflexivity is a useful process to help the visual sociologist to take unbiased images of reality.

Between these three types photo journalism, in today’s modern age, has most constraints: photo journalists photograph a wide area of social phenomenon, thus this does not allow for continuous study of the same area removing the opportunity for depth of analysis and understanding of a specialised area, therefore this could be reflected in how a photo is taken, then what is perceived by the viewer of the photo thus a construct or context is created and portrayed that may miss the value of the initial image taken and even skew or reinforce its purpose.  So in effect it’s almost sometimes as if we can’t see the image for the image that was taken...A visual Sociologist here would be seeking the very thing (depth of analysis and understanding from thematic investigation that a photo journalist may lack then.

Further, photo journalists work for Newspapers who themselves represent strong ideological views.  The projects presented to photo journalists are specific which means they are looking for a particular image, an image possibly constructed or imagined through the lens of superficial understandings of social phenomenon (Becker cited in Prosser 1998:95).

Documentary Photography on the other hand is looking at a specific social phenomenon and narrows its focus over perhaps a longitudinal scope to find out more, to appreciate social phenomenon or investigate, rather than to confirm, backed often with an in-depth theoretical knowledge surrounding the social phenomenon.

Documentary photography could be described as the continuous interest in specific social phenomenon; whereas photo journalism can be described as the prescribed search for relevant imagery?

Good sociological analysis or Visual Sociology would require repetitive comparisons of repeated occurrences of social phenomenon recurring at different times, spaces and/or places to generate data, data being the aim of visual sociology which stands it apart from Photo Journalism or Documentary Photography.

So then back to Becker’s original point and how these different types of photography are received: the essentially creates the image: the maker may take a photo of something he presumes is interesting but, how this is interpreted and given meaning is something attributed by the receiver.  For example a reader may fail to see what the maker has captured in the image and instead focus on something captured in the background, the reader spots the object and deems this more important the image then becomes this and the originally captured image of the maker fades into the background? Although the receiver of the image can only work with what has been constructed by the maker photographer and how the receiver interprets and add meaning to an image can largely be influence by the maker also. This is why the process of reflexivity is important and not just within Visual Sociology, but should be an integral responsibility of all people wielding the power held in the camera...

Local Children's Play Park: surrounded by houses, all looking towards the park. There are three different sources of technological surveillance surrounding this park, none of which are directed towards or capture any angle of the park, the human eye is the only surveillance here.  This begs the question what are we surveying? People or property? Methodologically speaking it is hard to capture the area an a whole in one picture would portray this much better, however the detail would them be minute and possibly become invisible...