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.