Technologies of Visibility. Notes on Current Surveillance Practices

Abstract

Surveillance is defined by a set of socio-technical patterns that shape visibility and inter-visibility relations. The text outlines connections deemed to be central to develop a better understanding of the development and implementation of a range of technologies that re-shape visibility relations among social subjects, sites and events. The crucial question focuses on how the individual body and the body of populations come to form two poles or two action fields of control, and how factors such as docility, participation and sociability are mobilized in new surveillance formations.