The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance

Abstract

This article explores a range of technologies for 'lateral surveillance' or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds with an ideology of 'responsibilization' associated with the risk society: that consumers need training in the consumption of services and the development of expertise to monitor one another. Rather than displacing 'top-down' forms of monitoring, such practices emulate and amplify them, fostering the internalization of government strategies and their deployment in the private sphere. In an age in which everyone is to be considered potentially suspect, all are simultaneously urged to become spies.