Empowering Residents: A Theoretical Framework for Negotiating Surveillance Technologies

Abstract

The aim of this article is to develop an understanding of negotiation as a proactive user behavior in response to persuasive, surveillance-enabling technologies. We work with a case where the ambition is to use maps to persuade residents in marginalized residential areas to take co-ownership of the future of their neighborhood. However, we argue that by negotiating persuasive technologies, residents can domesticate and “reconfigure” these, thus we need to broaden the dominant understanding of persuasion (Fogg 2003) to include the process of negotiation. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory, we argue that we need a framework that takes into account negotiations of other actors than the persuasive designer to bring a more nuanced and active understanding of responses to surveillance technologies. This article suggests that negotiation can be both user empowering as well as a productive measure in an ongoing designer-user relation. While the designer persuades, the user negotiates, and this dynamic relation contributes to potentially better technology development.