The Common Gaze

Eric Stoddart

Description

Our political spheres are riven with micro-targeted political advertising that degrades the possibilities and incentive for shared, respectful debate. We are producers as well as consumers of data when we record our physical, and sometimes our spiritual, exercise on smartphone apps. The algorithms which identify us, granting us access to state and corporate provision, are not objective but often deeply discriminatory against people of colour and those lower on socio-economic scales.
Offering a ground-breaking new perspective on one of the great concerns of our time, Eric Stoddart examines everyday surveillance in the light of concern for the common good. He reveals the urgent need to challenge data gathering and analysis that weakens the social fabric by dividing people into categories largely based on inferred characteristics, and interprets surveillance in relation to God’s preferential option for those who are poor. The Common Gaze is a call not only for revised surveillance but for better ways of understanding how God sees.

Sujets

• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334060062
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Common Gaze
Eric Stoddart






© Eric Stoddart 2021
Published in 2021 by SCM Press
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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To John Kitchen and Calum Robertson, Director and Assistant Director of Music, and to the choristers of Old St Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church, Edinburgh – whose commitment to beautiful music lightened the darkness of writing about the Holocaust during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown.

To Harry van der Weijde, Lana Woolford and Eleanor Smith who, overnight, became a broadcast team to livestream beauty in the darkness.




Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1
1. Surveillance as a Twenty-first-century Culture
2. The Common Gaze as a Twenty-first-century Imaginary
Part 2
3. Influence: Hacking Citizens
4. Identity: Quantifying Yourself
5. Identification: Algorithms of Oppression and Liberation
Part 3
6. Common Gazing as Public Practice
7. Common Gazing as Church Practice

Conclusion

Afterword
Bibliography




Acknowledgements
I wrote much of this book during the Covid-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, but the research and conceptual development stretches back over a good few years. I am grateful to the University of St Andrews for a semester of research leave in the autumn of 2018, which provided me with the space not only to read but to think. To the colleagues who covered my various roles in the School of Divinity, not least T. J. Lang for being acting director of our distance-learning postgraduate programme, ‘Bible and the Contemporary World’, I offer my thanks.
I have appreciated immensely the support of those colleagues in St Andrews and much further afield who share my sense of urgency around issues of surveillance, religion and politics, particularly Mario Aguilar (St Andrews), Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson (Sweden) and David Lyon (Canada). They, as well as members of the Surveillance and Religion Network, which I jointly coordinate with Susanne, inspire me to keep on grappling with a rapidly expanding field.
A grant from the J. & A. Deas Fund (St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews) helped significantly with my purchase of books directly related to this volume. I owe a debt of gratitude to friends without whom this book may well not yet have seen the light of day: Phil, Jubin, Kim, Patrick and Sheila.



Introduction
Test, track and trace
Test students to see if they have reached their cohort benchmark. Track students’ individual and peers’ progress over their years in school. Trace those not attaining learning goals or whose early-life indicators suggest they may be at risk of low achievement, and intervene with extra assistance.
Test workers’ productivity. Track the effect on the company. Trace those who are a liability to efficiency.
Test a voter’s susceptibility to a particular message. Track this campaign’s spread. Trace voters who might be similarly persuaded.
Test a person’s lifestyle stability for housing allocation. Track the system’s effect on homelessness. Trace the clients who fall back into chaotic patterns.
Test a congregant’s involvement in church life. Track the success of discipleship programmes. Trace members who need to be encouraged.
Self-test your running speed and stamina. Self-track your progress. Be traced by advertisers with equipment and programmes.
Test, track and trace has been a mantra of public health agencies responding to the Covid-19 pandemic but is a strategy for multiple forms of surveillance. Familiar too in the plots of crime movies, testing a suspect, tracking their suspicious movements and tracing their nefarious contacts is a well-trodden path accelerated, and complicated, by digital technologies.
Surveillance is, in David Lyon’s definition, ‘the operations and experiences of gathering and analysing personal data for influence, entitlement and management’ (Lyon 2018a, p. 6). In advanced capitalist societies we encounter surveillance at numerous points in our everyday life but the intensity, fairness and consequences are not the same for all of us. Our ethnicity, income level and religion are among the factors that mean we can reap considerable benefits from surveillance systems or can be burdened with further weight of discrimination. In one area of life we might benefit while being disadvantaged in another. Some of our personal data we offer freely to digital platforms so that we can gain personalized information appropriate to our interests. We may not be so aware that our interests can also be influenced by what we then receive. As George Dyson so pithily observes, ‘Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think’ (Dyson 2012, p. 308). We construct our identity by comparison with vastly greater audiences than did our pre-digital forebears. It may only be at the very back of our minds that the valuable data points we generate when we track our exercise regimes are our free work for informational capitalists monetizing the moves we make. At so many points we need to be identifiable, not just when we travel through international borders but in daily life when accessing particular buildings or proving our entitlement to welfare or health services.
If we ask what all this surveillance is for we receive answers that include some combination of national security, value for money, efficiency, convenience, profit, political advantage or the like. However, this can be taken to a deeper level when asked alongside the question, ‘ Who are these systems for?’ Surveillance for the common good is the answer this book explores. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (UNESCO 2015, p. 77) uses the Christian moral theologian Lisa Cahill’s expression to explain the common good as ‘a solidaristic association of persons that is more than the good of individuals in the aggregate’ (Cahill 2004, p. 8). Another prominent Christian ethicist, also within the Roman Catholic tradition, provides UNESCO with a further clarification: ‘It is the good of being a community – “the good realized in the mutual relationships in and through which human beings achieve their well-being”’ (UNESCO 2015, p. 77, quoting Hollenbach (2002, p. 81).
A common-good approach lifts us out of silos of individualist thinking that focus on how surveillance impacts upon human rights of, typically, privacy. Stepping back, as is the wont of much liberal democracy, from questions of what constitutes ‘the good’ in favour of leaving those as private rather than public questions, impoverishes a critical discussion of surveillance. Privacy features little in this book, precisely in order to keep our attention focused on what might lie beyond those trenches, used as they are for important forays against what are sometimes dubious government and corporate intrusions into our personal lives.
In a world in which being influenced, building our identity and being identified are interwoven and saturated with surveillance, this project proposes a new concept: the common gaze.
Surveillance under the sign of the cross, and more
In Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society: Watching and Being Watched , I draw on a feminist critical hermeneutic of care to probe behind contemporary surveillance. I am interested there in how surveillance is legitimated, particularly around conceptions of risk. Rather than draw on privacy as the central critique, I opt for the less-familiar social practice of (in)visibility – the skill of managing how we make ourselves, and are made, more and less visible in particular contexts. While others had, and have since, articulated a normative ethics of surveillance, my offer in 2011 is of a discursive ethic:
It is an approach that understands the ethical moment to be one of continual interrogation of all that circulates around, impacts upon, and feeds back into interdependent human flourishing. This is not the application of a universal principle of caring in turn used as a criterion against which surveillance is judged per se . A critical ethic of care shows considerable family resemblance to a discursive ethic that attends to the particularity of people’s situations; facing up to how we are being formed and forming one another, disclosing and refusing re-closure is the mode of being ethical. (Stoddart 2011, p. 51)
This is, in Michel Foucault’s terms, ethics as ‘the conscious [ réfléchie ] practice of freedom’ (Foucault 2000, p. 284). In Theological Persp