Article:
The Ubiquitous View: Surveillance, Imagination, and the Power of Being Seen

Author(s): Ahrens, Jörn

Abstract

The _Essay discusses the relation between surveillance and imagination. It unfolds the argument that surveillance as a form of (political) oppression is necessarily cen-tering on a decisionistic act of the individual who has to opt for deviant or conformist behavior under conditions of obvious social and political surveillance. Today, how-ever, especially due to processes of an ongoing digitalization, surveillance is becom-ing a mode of self-expression, experiencing a shift towards its habituation and nor-malization within social reality. This development marks a clear difference from the classic habituation of surveillance as estranged, governmental practice. What seems to remain intact with regard to contemporary concepts of surveillance is the im-portance of the view and the meaning of surveillance as a politics of the image and the imaginary.

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BibTex
Ahrens, Jörn: The Ubiquitous View: Surveillance, Imagination, and the Power of Being Seen. In: On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, Jg. 6 (2018), . DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/4069.
@ARTICLE{Ahrens2018,
 author = {Ahrens, Jörn},
 title = {The Ubiquitous View: Surveillance, Imagination, and the Power of Being Seen},
 year = 2018,
 doi = {10.25969/mediarep/4069},
 volume = 6,
 address = {Gießen},
 journal = {On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture},
 pages = {--},
}
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