The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure
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Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 230–248 The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure Mark Andrejevic ᮀ—Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labor developed in the essay is applied to the online economy and the example of interactive TV. The analysis suggests that a critical approach to forms of surveillance facilitated by interactive media must focus on asymmetries of power and control over information technologies and resources. URING the halcyon days of the e-commerce—an entrepreneurial Tru- Dhigh-tech economy—at the dawn man Burbank—DotComGuy hoped to of the new millennium—an entrepre- turn his Website into a for-profit corpo- neurial-minded former employee of the ration that would generate enough AirTouch corporation decided to money to support his handlers and change his name to DotComGuy and earn him a $98,000 paycheck for his live his life on-line. For the former year-long stint in the DotCompound. Mitch Maddox (a.k.a. DotComGuy) The plan started swimmingly—Dot- the decision was more than just a life- ComGuy’s stunt resulted in media cov- style decision; it was a business deci- erage that drew sponsors and captured sion. By living his life in front of 25 the attention of viewers, who gener- cameras installed in his house and yard, ated more than a million hits a day for DotComGuy hoped to demonstrate the his Website during its first few months benefits of e-commerce, ordering ev- (personal interview with Mitch Mad- erything he needed on-line so that he dox, Sept. 16, 2000). By the end of the wouldn’t have to leave his home for a year, the euphoria over the on-line year. As an on-line advertisement for economy had been replaced by a healthy dose of skepticism, and as the NASDAQ headed south, so did Dot- Mark Andrejevic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Fairfield Uni- ComGuy’s fortunes. On New Year’s versity. He would like to acknowledge the invalu- Day 2001, DotComGuy left the com- able assistance of Bonnie J. Dow and of the pound behind and forfeited his $98,000 essay’s anonymous reviewers in developing the payday, keeping as payment only those manuscript’s arguments and preparing it for products that the company had pur- publication. chased or received for promotional pur- Copyright 2002, National Communication Association 231 CSMC ANDREJEVIC poses (Copeland, 2001). DotComGuy’s wherein networks are winning ratings venture may have failed as a business battles by enlisting people to submit enterprise, but it succeeded in drawing their lives to comprehensive scrutiny, attention to an important aspect of the the claim that being watched is a form emerging online economy: the produc- of value-generating labor ought not to tivity of comprehensive surveillance. be a particularly surprising one. We DotComGuy understood that while are not just facing a world in which a he was in the DotCompound, he was few select members of the audience are working 24-hours-a-day. Even when he entering the celebrity ranks and cash- was sleeping, the image of Maddox ing in on their 15 minutes of fame, but tucked into bed in his Dallas home was one in which non-celebrities—the re- surrounded with banner ads and the maining viewers—are being recruited names of sponsors, some of which were to participate in the labor of being posted on the walls of his house. It was watched to an unprecedented degree for the work he was performing by by subjecting the details of their daily subjecting himself to online surveil- lives to increasingly pervasive and com- lance that DotComGuy was to receive prehensive forms of high-tech monitor- his $98,000 payday. That he failed to ing. Their viewing habits, their shop- turn a profit doesn’t alter the economic ping habits, even their whereabouts fact upon which his entrepreneurial are subject not just to monitoring but venture was based: that the emerging to inclusion in detailed marketing data- online economy increasingly seeks to bases, thanks to the advent of com- exploit the work of being watched. puter-based forms of interactive me- DotComGuy may have failed to capi- dia. This observation has become a talize on this labor as an entrepreneur, commonplace in the popular literature but major corporations continue to at- on new media and has generated plenty tempt to exploit the economic poten- of discussion on the fate of personal tial of this labor on a much larger scale. privacy in the on-line economy (see, Some 15 years ago, Jhally and Li- for example, Garfinkel, 2000; Rosen, vant (1986), inspired by the work of 2000; Whitaker, 1999). The consensus Dallas Smythe (1977; 1981), argued seems to be that the development of that communication theory needed to interactive media and of computer pro- take seriously the notion that audi- cessing and storage power enable the ences were working when they were increasing economic exploitation of watching television. This paper seeks comprehensive forms of consumer to develop their argument a bit fur- monitoring. In response, organizations ther—to update it, as it were, for an era like the Electronic Privacy Informa- of new-media interactivity—by high- tion Center (EPIC) have organized to lighting the emerging significance of advocate for consumer privacy rights the work not just of watching, but of and protection from creeping corpo- being watched. The two complement rate surveillance. each other, insofar as the development The drawback of much of the discus- of interactive media allows for the ratio- sion about privacy, as authors includ- nalization of viewing and consumption ing Lyon (1994) and Gandy (1993) have in general, thanks to devices like inter- suggested, is that the attempt to defend active television that watch us while we privacy rights has a disconcerting ten- watch. In the era of “reality” TV, dency to work as much in the interest 232 THE WORK OF BEING WATCHED JUNE 2002 of the corporations doing the monitor- Foucault’s (1975/1977) discussion of ing as in that of the individuals being disciplinary surveillance offers an ap- monitored. The development of demo- proach to the question of power that graphic databases relies heavily on the seems particularly relevant to the devel- protection accorded to private prop- opment of the online economy since it erty, since these databases are profit- focuses not so much on the repressive able in large part because the informa- force of panopticism, but its produc- tion they contain is proprietary. As tive deployment. The potential of the Lyon (1994) puts it, “Privacy grows online economy that has recently at- from the same modern soil as surveil- tracted so much speculation—both fi- lance, which is another reason for nancial and cultural—is predicated in doubting its efficacy as a tool of counter- large part on the anticipated productiv- surveillance” (p. 21). ity of generalized network surveil- As an alternative to the popular por- lance. The power in question is not the trayal of the proliferation of corporate static domination of a sovereign Big surveillance in terms of the incredible Brother, but that of a self-stimulating shrinking private sphere, this essay sug- incitement to productivity: the multipli- gests an approach influenced by the cation of desiring subjects and subjects’ concerns of political economy and the desires in accordance with the rational- analysis of disciplinary panopticism. ization of consumption. In this context, Conceived as a form of labor, the work the production of ever more refined of being watched can be critiqued in and detailed categories of desiring sub- terms of power and differential access jectivities serves, as Butler’s (1997) anal- to both the means of surveillance and ysis suggests, as a site for the reiteration the benefits derived from their deploy- of existing conditions and relations of ment. The operative question is not power. whether a particular conception of pri- The starting point for an analysis of vacy has been violated but, rather: what surveillance as exploitation is the asser- are the relations that underwrite entry tion that just as workplace monitoring contributes to the rationalization of pro- into a relationship of surveillance, and duction, so on-line surveillance contrib- who profits from the work of being utes to the rationalization of consump- watched? Such an analysis draws its tion. The attempt to extend the inspiration from Robins and Webster’s monitoring reach of corporate manag- (1999) assessment of the Information ers via the internet serves to compel Revolution as “a matter of differential personal disclosure by replacing non- (and unequal) access to, and control monitored forms of consumption with over, information resources” (p. 91). monitored interactive transactions. The Gandy (1993), quoting Klaus Lenk, cuts following sections attempt to trace the to the heart of the matter: outlines of the process whereby the The real issue at stake is not personal work of being watched comes to serve privacy, which is an ill-defined concept, as a means of rationalizing not just greatly varying according to the cultural what Jhally and Livant (1986) call the context. It is power gains of bureaucracies, work of watching, but the process of both private and public, at the expense of on-line consumption in general.