BGillespie's Blog: "Lateral surveillance or peer-to-peer monitoring encompasses romantic interests, family, and friends or acquaintances. This type of surveillance is engaged via google, cameras, lie detectors, cell phones, and instant messages. Has this gone too far? Is it appropriate to be keeping track of friends like this. Does that represent the qualities of a true friend? This peer-to-peer monitoring is done indirectly and appears to be second nature for most people. Constantly text messaging on the cell phone, checking email all the time, and facebook are prime examples."I wonder if the experience of friendship is different. It's hard for me to imagine the appeal of facebook or a relation to other people where looking at their profile repeatedly is part of everyday life. I confess, I don't understand this well at all.
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9 comments:
Interesting comment. I was going to comment on this paragraph on BG's blog, but I will here.
I disagree with you to a certain degree. I don't text me friends, parents or whoever to spy on them. I simply text or call people to know how they are doing or to see what their plans are and if they want to get together. I don't do it out of a secret suspicion.
As of right now, I would not say we have gone too far. I do not think we have gone too far with this. Prof. Dean raises a good question about the appeal of consistently looking at Facebook daily. I will be honest; I don't really see any appeal in at as well. I typically will go on Facebook for only its intended purpose. Look up someone who I want to get in contact with that I have not seen in a while. I would like to see how that person is doing and catch up on their life.
From Sam
i never considered this. Yeah, i do text my friends to see what they are up to. And I'm guilty of checking my friends’ pictures out on facebook. But i never considered these actions to be a form of monitoring or surveilling (if that's a word) of my friends. I usually regard monitoring negatively; something that's a hassle or intrusive. With that said I'd hate to think I spy on my friends... but do i? Have i become so immune to a facebook lifestyle that i don't even stop to think what exactly it is I'm doing each time i login to my account? I am going to continue blogging about this on my blog.
-adrienne
I'm glad you raised this point,Adrienne. I think it will be useful to the whole class: monitoring and surveillance designate actions of looking to see what's going on, checking on who is doing what, when, where, with whom. These days we are more likely to do this through digital media.
In contrast, when I was in high school and college, if you wanted to know about a person, you would ask someone they knew. Then maybe that person would tell them. Maybe they wouldn't. There was no physical record (digital trace) of checking on them. And, there weren't things like facebook where you could learn much about them. At best, you'd look at the yearbook. But that wouldn't tell you who their friends were. And of course there were not frequently updates pics or moods or anything like that.
I'm glad someone brought up this point about facebook etc.
Its hard to separate just "checking in" on one of your friends from monitoring/surveilling them. I don't know if anyone else does, but i call the news feed on facebook my "stalker feed". Constant information on what everyone is doing (that is posted without being expressly deleted) is definitely a form of peer surveillance but one that has become so natural, so everyday.
During the summer, I found that it felt strange to not be completely up to date with what everyone was doing. Some of my friends were ok with the disconnect but some would call up demanding that I return to facebook because I had "fallen off the face of the earth".
I still disagree. I think that watching pictures on facebook is not monitoring. It is just seeing what your friends are up too.
In addition I would argue that my reason for going on my on facebook and tagging people etc is because I want my friends to know what I am doing. I want to them to see how my day at Niagara falls was for example. So basically it is just a different way of telling them how I am. I would say the same on the phone, in an email or even face to face.
So how can something be monitoring if I am just telling my friends what I am doing?
By
Merel van Helden
Merel--in your example, you are reporting/disclosing. Your friends are monitoring.
There are many different sorts of monitoring:
--seeing what is posted on facebook or on blogs;
--asking one's partner or kids 'what did you do today?';
--following stock prices;
--keeping track of who is present in class and who is absent;
--taking a patient's temperature.
The claim that a practice is monitoring is a descriptive not an evaluative claim.
Personally I am kind of in the middle on this one because I can definately see both sides to the story. If I go onto facebook it is not to monitor my friends but just to see what they are doing or how they are doing, but I can definately see how one could see this as monitoring or surveilling. I notice this a lot with one of my roommates, he, who shall remain nameless, has a girlfriend who goes to another school, and over the past couple of years they have been in pictures with people of the opposite sex. Though these pictures are harmless, they have gotten in multiple fights because they accuse one another of cheating on another. So they basically use pictures to spy on one other. This just shows that because there is so much information about you on facebook, that it is very easy to monitor what someone is doing if you really want to.
To go off of Professor Dean's comment of monitoring... I agree that it is the other or who ever is on the opposite end that is doing the monitoring. Most of the time we do not even realize it. Our millennial generation is so accustomed to facebook that many may not consider it a monitoring device. However it does have the potential for that use and is commonly used in that manner.
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