Surveillance and Everyday Life

Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 2 Comments

Sydney University’s Surveillance and Everyday Life project is running a two day conference next month, and the program (pdf) has just been announced.

Looks like I’m speaking on day two. The paper is something I’m working on for a collection on ‘identity technologies’ edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak.

This is one of a series of pieces inspired by teaching my course, Intimacy, Love and Friendship, which runs again this semester. I welcome input and more examples! Details below.

All in your hands: Smart phones, intimacy and adultery

This paper explores emerging practices of intimacy, publicity and privacy evident in a range of mobile media applications, particularly those that facilitate and obscure adulterous behaviour. The forms of surveillance imagined through these technology designs, and their gendered assumptions, will be features of the analysis. The paper draws together a history of writing on love and flirtation, theories of intimacy and friendship, and empirical studies of mobile media – including research conducted by the author on technology use among white collar professionals. In this framework, smart phones are shown to reflect the vulnerabilities of contemporary relationships as much as their changing function. If mobile technologies provide an infrastructure to relieve the tensions inherent in normative coupledom today, they also hold the potential to refigure our sense of domesticity’s function, most obviously in terms of the link between physical proximity and intimacy. The surveillance capacities of new media devices here offer insights into emerging models of friendship, sexual ethics and care.

Category: Academia, Gender, Research, Sexuality

Comments

2 Responses to “Surveillance and Everyday Life”

  1. Paul O'Connor
    January 21st, 2012 @ 1:04 am

    Very interesting. Been following your blog for a while and I always enjoy it. This made me think about the everyday life ways we track friends through social networking and the complications with intimacy that it creates. It is on a tangent to the more central issue of surveillance, but I made a post about it on my blog.

    http://everydayhybridity.tumblr.com/post/16171200085/

  2. Adultery technologies : home cooked theory
    March 10th, 2012 @ 2:08 pm

    [...] for those who were interested, here is a draft of the piece I presented last month on smart phones, intimacy and [...]

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