Research How to Cite: Muthyala, John. 2019. “Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World.” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 9(1): 18, pp. 1–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.332 Published: 27 September 2019 Peer Review: This is a peer-reviewed article in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Muthyala, John. 2019. “Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World.” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 9(1): 18, pp. 1–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.332 RESEARCH Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World John Muthyala University of Southern Maine, US
[email protected] Digital technologies are essential to establishing new forms of dominance through drones and surveillance systems; these forms have significant effects on individuality, privacy, democracy, and American foreign policy; and popular culture registers how the uses of drone technologies for aesthetic, educational, and governmental purposes raise questions about the exercise of individual, governmental, and social power. By extending computational methodologies in the digital humanities like macroanalysis and distant reading in the context of drones and surveillance, this article demonstrates how drone technologies alter established notions of war and peace, guilt and innocence, privacy and the common good; in doing so, the paper connects postcolonial studies to the digital humanities.