Group Proposal

Group Proposal
As a group we have come to a decision to tackle the topic of surveillance. We will be paying close analysis to the case study of new media technology such as the mobile phone. One particular program that plays on the notion of surveillance and mobile privacy is Fox 8’s The Phone. The show is part reality and part scripted and follows a game show premise where two phones are placed randomly in a city and when the phone rings someone answers. Whoever answers has three hours to find clues to help find the briefcase with $25,000 cash inside. Throughout the game, the phone will ring with information on what to do next. Two random strangers are paired up and sent around the town looking for memory cards that hold the secrets to the location of the briefcase. In this case study we will also be looking at the definition of embeddedness and how daily reliance on mobile phones allows the mobile phone to become a physical part of our daily living. We will also be looking to see how we can relate this to technological surveillance.Through our case study of The Phone we will be examining the following points:
Observation
Being watched or observed through tapping or hacking our mobile phones e.g. in ‘The Phone’, organizers are able to map out every thing we do daily because we are in constant contact with our phones

One of the major problems for this is the fact that we do not know where this surveillance information is going. As Giannachi says in The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007; pg42) it could be “operated by a public service, a private business, an individual or a group of citizens… We don’t know.”
Using this quote as a springboard we will examine the consequences of people understanding these hacking capabilities and how their use or interaction would differ.Would this change their normal performances/ behaviors in society and rather begin to behave through aesthetic, cultural, or quotidian performances as they know someone may be watching?
Identity

As Peggy Phelan discusses, identity and visibility does not always equal the truth. Therefore even extremely private conversations, where someone feels they are in a private space will be playing a role in some respect fitting into societies norms (for the surveyor). This defeats the concept of mobile phone technology bringing private to a physically public space (“hypervisibility” [Bryoni week 4 lecture]).
We will also be looking at ‘The Blast Theory’ and the theory of the “panopticon”, which is a prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." This is clearly relates to mobile phone surveillance, as the user of the phone has no way of telling if they are being surveyed.

Lou, Darin, Clem, Alex & Annabel