This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/acceptedfor publication in the following source:

Dee, Mike(2016)A social history of being watched: from mass observation to mass surveil-lance. InThe Australian Sociological Association (TASA) 2016 Annual Conference:Cities and Successful Societies, 2016-11-28 - 2016-12-01. (Unpublished)

This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/109430/

c© 2016 The Author

This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under aCreative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use andthat permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu-ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then referto the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog-nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe thatthis work infringes copyright please provide details by email to qut.copyright@qut.edu.au

Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record(i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub-mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) canbe identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear-ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source.

A social history of being watched: from Mass Observation to Mass Surveillance

Being Watched: A Brief History in at least 4 stages…(a journal article and book proposal in progress….)• Being watched or surveilled in any form, by the state or its agents has distinct, but

non-linear and messy, stages:

• Stage 1: Poor laws and beyond….• Following King William’s Domesday Book of 1085, a ‘simple and ancient’ form of data

compilation can be discerned in England in the 1500s, in taxation, census and early poor law administration.

• This inaugural moment in the creation of the surveillance state, while delineating rights to private property and parish poor relief, through the exercise of ‘pastoral power’ (Foucault 1981: 47), also built a provisional infrastructure for social control, over religious orders also, ‘heretics, devils and witches’ (Marx 2003: 17), the categorisation and sanctioning of the ‘deserving and undeserving’ poor (Kennedy 1982: 153), and also workers organising for better pay and conditions (Lyon 2002).

Stage 2: Urbanisation: poverty and welfare• Over time and in often haphazard ways, the urbanisation of England and much of

Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries led to myriad forms of paper based surveillance in census information, registries of populations for taxation, conscription, citizenship, public health and more (Marx 2003; Henman and Adler 2003).

• The emergence of professions such as teaching and social work can be identified in this period, along with increased interest in questions and concerns about social life in the wake of upheavals due to poverty, disease, civil unrest and war (Weiner 1984).

• The urban context provided a complex seam of material upon which the state could act, including the study of poverty, supported by the gathering and use of statistics as an evidence base for measures to oversee, control, punish and also assist the poor (Williams 1973; Checkland & Checkland 1974; Foucault 1981; Novak 1997; Byrne 2001; Henman & Adler 2003).

Stage 3: Mass Observation (MO)

Mass Observation (MO) “An anthropology of ourselves” • Mass-Observation was a large-scale investigation into the habits and customs of the

people of Britain that was started in Bolton in 1937. Bolton was named “Worktown” by Tom Harrisson. The project focused on Bolton initially and during the Second World War was enlisted by the Government to monitor public morale in the population as a whole. The project still exists today and the archive is currently held at the University of Sussex. http://www.massobs.org.uk/mass-observation-1937-1950s

• “In taking up the role of observer, each person becomes like Courbet at his easel, Cuvier with his cadaver, and Humboldt with his continent.”

• The inventors of the new science were Charles Madge, a poet, journalist, and card carrying Communist; Humphrey Jennings, a Surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker; and Tom Harrisson, a renegade anthropologist more at home with cannibals than with academics. They were a fractious triumvirate from the outset, never even agreeing whether their group’s name meant observation of the masses or by them, but between 1937 and 1945 hundreds of people mailed in regular reports of their daily lives (Crain 2006).

Observing life in the pub, in Bolton, 1936-37 (Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People, London, Gollancz, 1943; reprinted Seven Dials Press, 1971)

Life in Bolton streets, 1939(Mass-Observation, War Begins at Home, London, Chatto & Windus, 1940)

Messages from the King…..• In 1939, with war looming, the Ministry of Information commissioned three posters

with the aim of reassuring the British public when the inevitable came.

• They were meant to be messages from the King to his people, and the three slogans were Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory, Freedom Is In Peril and, of course, Keep Calm and Carry On. Hundreds of thousands were printed, and the first two were plastered all over the country in their hundreds and thousands as soon as war was declared. But the third – Keep Calm –was held back in the case of invasion.

• This never came, and the poster was eventually pulped and forgotten. Until in 2000 a single copy turned up in a box of books at Barter Books in Alnwick. The owners framed it, and then were asked about it so much that they reprinted a few copies.

When messages/propaganda go wrong….

• Mass Observation understood the idea that Your Courage would bring Us Victory meant that the general mass of the people would be making a sacrifice on behalf of the upper classes, who would reap the real benefits.

• This evoked memories of the last war, where many people felt that ordinary soldiers had suffered while the generals got off scot free, which wasn’t a particularly good set of associations to be revisiting at the start of another conflict.

• Also, as MO discovered in Bolton and other parts of northern England, many resentments remained after WW1 (1914-1918) at continuing poverty and promises by the ruling classes to make life for ordinary people, better failed to materialise.

Stage 4: Crises of Modernity-Post Modernity….Welfare State, Terrorism, Neoliberalism, Mass Surveillance

Urban welfare crises• The use of surveillance by welfare and other authorities is not therefore a new

phenomenon in social governance, and in Australia there has been a marked increase in the surveillance of jobseekers, in train since the late 1990s (Parker and Fopp 2005). This includes Job Capacity Assessments for people with disabilities to establish their capacity to work and Activity Agreements outlining recipient’s contractual obligations and possible sanctions if they fail to comply (Lantz and Marston 2012).

• Such gathering of information achieves a virtual solid form as a ‘data body’ (Stalder 2002: 120). This body of information goes everywhere with the consuming citizen, carrying a weight of detail in its ‘data trailings’ to convey, for example, a track record of personal finance to a lending institution, or a snapshot of health records to a physician (Henman and Marston 2008: 188).

• On arrival anywhere, the citizen has already been ‘measured and classified’ and also ‘sorted’ (Lyon 2003: 6) and is treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Stalder 2002: 125).

• In describing the emergence of a ‘preventative-surveillance state’, Wrennall (2010: 314) notes the creation of a data double, or ‘the virtual self created by dataveillance’, whereby the ‘virtual self, emptied of real content, becomes a mirror for surveillance, filled with whatever conjectural information surveillance has placed there’ (Wrennall 2010: 317; Clarke 1994).

Birmingham violence: CCTV of looters and rioters shown on big screens in city centre. POLICE have taken to the streets to beam photographs of suspected looters and rioters to the public from a large mobile screen.The ‘Digi-Van’ is being driven around Birmingham city centre to show CCTV images of more than 50 suspects on its six-metresquare display unit.It is the first time that such a tactic has been used by police as they stepped up their hunt for the troublemakers who heaped shame on the city.Read More: http://www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2011/08/12/birmingham-violence-cctv-of-looters-and-rioters-shown-on-big-screens-in-city-centre-97319-29226039/#ixzz28i0fZsHA

13

A collection of linked issues/trends…• The normalisation of CCTV and other forms of surveillance (loyalty cards, welfare

cards, travel cards, EFTPOS cards, etc)

• Increasing potential to watch others and ourselves, via home CCTV and wearable technologies and ingestible devices, as a co-opted agent of the state

• Anti-terrorism discourses cement this citizen role as a duty, to watch and detect ‘suspect communities’ and inform on them

• Previous, older ‘suspect communities’ include Irish people in 1950s England, subject to surveillance by authorities

• Professions such as Social Work now agents of ‘Dataveillance’ through the ‘Electronic Turn’ in Child Protection and other forms welfare surveillance

• ‘Smart’ cities, wired for connectivity, facilitate new and contestable constructions of urban citizenship

Back in Australia….

15

MO Publications

• Charles Madge & Humphrey Jennings, eds. May the Twelfth, Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, by over two hundred observers, London, Faber and Faber, 1937. ISBN 0-571-14872-7

• Charles Madge & Tom Harrisson, Mass-Observation (pamphlet), London, Frederick Muller, 1937.

• Charles Madge & Tom Harrisson, First Year's Work, London, Lindsay Drummond, 1938.

• Charles Madge & Tom Harrisson, Britain, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1939.

• Mass-Observation, War Begins at Home, London, Chatto & Windus, 1940.

• Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People, London, Gollancz, 1943; reprinted Seven Dials Press, 1971.

• Mass-Observation, War Factory, London, Gollancz, 1943.

• Tom Harrisson, Britain Revisited, London, Gollancz, 1961.

• Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz, London, Collins, 1976.

ReferencesThe National Archives (TNA), CAB 16/127 MIC 7 ‘Report of the MOI Planning Subcommittee’, 27 Jul 1936.

Philip M. Taylor, ‘If War Should Come: Preparing the Fifth Arm for Total War 1935-39’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1983), pp. 32-3.

TNA, CAB 16/127 MIC 7 ‘Report of the MOI Planning Subcommittee’, 27 Jul 1936.

Mariel Grant, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-war Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 239-41.

Mariel Grant, ‘Towards a Central Office of Information: Continuity and Change in British Government Information Policy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34:1 (1999), 49-67.

Michael Stenton, ‘British Propaganda and Raision d’Etat’, European Studies Review, 10 (1980), p. 50 and Taylor, ‘If War Should Come: Preparing the Fifth Arm for Total War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 16 (1981), p. 39.

TNA, CAB 16/127, MIC 16 ‘Report by Sir Stephen Tallents’, 14 Nov 1938.

TNA, CAB 16/127 MIC 5th, 14 Dec 1938.

Temple Willcox, ‘Projection or Publicity? Rival Concepts in the Pre-War Planning of the British Ministry of Information’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (1983), p. 97.

Henry Irving, 'The Ministry's Launch', MOI Digital, 23 June 2014.

Henry Irving, 'The Ministry at a Glance', MOI Digital, 23 June 2014.

Macmillan, A Man of Law’s Tale: The Reminiscences of the Rt Hon Lord Macmillan(London: Macmillan, 1952), p. 171.

Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), p. 36.

Forms of Surveillance….Organised, conducted by people in roles, such as guards or police

• Mechanical, facilitated by electronic or mechanical devices

• Natural, created by the placement of physical features, activities and people in such a way as to maximize visibility /monitoring

• Garner Clancey (Lecturer, Sydney Institute of Criminology) & Dr Rohan Lulham (Postdoctoral Fellow, Design Out Crime Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney)