33 Literature and Surveillance in Cyberspace

Mr. Rindon Kundu

Contents

1. Objectives of the Module
2. Definitions of ‘cyberspace’, ‘cyberliterature’
3. Understanding the concept of Surveillance
4. Literature in Cyberspace: A Study
5. Summary

1. Objectives of the Module

This module starts with defining the terms like cyberspace, cyber literature, and most importantly surveillance as well as we will learn about the intrinsic relationship between these concepts. To know the contemporary literary trends we should understand the different mediums literature is taking its course, especially with the rapid growth of internet, new forms are getting popularized i.e., blogs, cyber fiction, nano poetry, micro drama, nano- fiction, micro stories etc. Surveillance studies have become an academic field in its own right within the last fifteen years. Although the majority of publications related to the topics like digital humanism, post-humanism etc are touching on many of the core issues of surveillance. However, it is only within recent years when visual art exhibitions and reality TV programmes began responding on a larger scale to the increasing pervasiveness of surveillance technology in our everyday lives. In Western societies cultural studies has taken a serious interest in issues of surveillance. Nonetheless, there is still a significant need for inquiry into the cultural and aesthetic implications of the increased dominance of surveillance in a larger historical perspective and its relation with cyber-literature.

 2. Definitions of cyberspace cyberliterature:

According to Cambridge Dictionary the term ‘cyberspace’ has been defined as ‘the online world of computer networks and especially the Internet’, ‘the online world of computer networks  and  especially  the  Internet’. Piret  Viires  in  his  seminal  essay   “Literature   in Cyberspace”i has defined cyberliterature,

The most comprehensive definition of cyberliterature would proceed from the concept of digital literature – namely, literature created and presented by means of computer (presented mostly in WWW, but also on a CD or on a computer hard drive). In narrower terms, the concept of cyberliterature can be characterised by certain computer-specific qualities: multilinearity, lexias (blocks of text connected with various hypertext links) joined by links, linking a written text with multi-media, interactivity, etc. In the English language a parallel term hypertext literature has been used.

According to him “Cyberliterature could serve as an umbrella term which  could tentatively be divided in three” subtypes:

• All literary texts available in the Internet (WWW). This term covers prose or poetry texts available at the home pages of professional writers; anthologies of prose or poetry published and digitised; collections of classical texts (e.g. Project Gutenberg); online literature magazines (e.g. Ninniku), etc.
• Non-professional literary texts available at the Internet, which inclusion in literary analysis expands the boundaries of traditional literature. Here the net functions first and foremost as an independent place of publication. The term would cover home pages of amateur writers, groups of unrecognised young authors and their portals (e.g. Kloaak). Here we might also include peripheries of literature, such as fanfiction or blogs describing people’s daily life, also text-based role-playing games and collective online novels.
• Hypertext literature and cybertexts. These would include literary texts of more complex structure, which exploit various hypertext solutions, but also intricate multimedia cybertexts. Such cybertexts would be the most authentic example of multimedia artefacts, merging literature, visual arts, film, music.

Modern society, as Viires has argued, has transformed into information age, where artificial intelligence dominates over human intellect. Traditional literary forms have been forced to adapt computer technology. Ergo cyberliterature has evolved as a new medium of expression.

 According to his estimation, “cyberliterature has been relatively active since the late 1980s (the first conference on hypertext was held in 1987, see Koskimaa 2000) and shows no signs of fading.”

3.   Understanding the concept of Surveillance:

“After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance” by Bauman et al. takes Edward Snowden disclosure (2013) as a watershed point in the history of the theoretical understanding of the concept of surveillance.iv If we look back, 9/11 seems less like a transformative trigger event for surveillance, an axis around which ‘everything changed’, and more like an opportunity for the confirmation and strengthening of existing trends, particularly a growing anxiety amongst intelligence agencies that the Internet both supplied them with an amazing new source of data, much of it ‘freely given’ by participants on social media, but also presented a potential unlimited power in terms of controlling and surveilling the mass.v Bauman et al discuss what is it stake as a result of the Snowden revelations, noting how the idea of digital panopticism has changed post-Snowden and taken its departure from all the discussions surrounding the system of surveillance that existed prior to coming of Snowden.vi The article takes off from the Edward Snowden crisis (2013) which spills the beans of ‘Mass Surveillance System’ as well as explores the consequences of violation of democratic principles and legal rights. Not only the State operators i.e., US surveillance programs, surveillance systems from UK to Sweden, France to Germany but the private providers from Google to Apple, Microsoft to Facebook and telecom giants also collect data which consist both Content and Metacontent, which tells a story of one individual. Ronald Deibert in his article “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace after Snowden – 2015” has commented,

 This imperative to “collect it all” has focused government of United States’ attention squarely on the private sector, which owns and operates most of cyberspace. States began to apply pressure on companies to act as a proxy for government controls—policing their own networks for content deemed illegal, suspicious, or a threat to national security.

It is imperative to say that with the Snowden disclosures, the differentiation between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ is also brought into question. If we explore different surveillance systems – both  governmental  and  non-governmental  –  we  will  see  the  relationship  between  the ‘watcher’ and the ‘watched’. Using George Orwell’s interpretation of a surveillance society through dystopian surveillance mechanism as it is envisioned in his novel Nineteen Eighty- Four, we can clearly perceive the effects of surveillance in society. George Orwell was heavily influenced by the concept of ‘Panopticon’, an architectural plan by Jeremy Bentham and later social theory by Michel Foucault.viii The purpose of incorporating the metaphor of Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ to Roy Boyne’s ‘Post-Panoptimism’ (2000) is to describe the modern society as a post-panoptic society and to establish the metamorphosis of “representative democracies into totalitarian regime in the name of protection”, which further destabilises the balance between ‘Privacy’/’Liberty’ and ‘Security’.ix We have to understand the need for right balance between national security and individual’s right to privacy. With the understanding of the canon of “surveillance studies” and “critical security studies” we will now turn towards the fuzzing of national borders, complicated and ever-changing cartographies and lines of control/enforcement; smudging of lines between National security and Transnational surveillance; nationals and foreigners as well as how the private will of an individual is curbed by a constant threat of an invisible gaze. We have to keep in mind the global political economy of surveillance and how multiple states like Germany, France, Poland, Sweden, and Netherland etc have become, following the aftershock of Snowden incident, potential sites of resistance against “Big State” United State’s monopoly in collecting “Big Data”- collocation of social media, mobile connectivity and cloud computing. With a particular focus on Snowden’s exposure of NSA surveillance operations in Brazil we can see a number of major international fallouts after Snowden leaks for example the Brazilian blowout; European Union snubbing of US surveillance; resistance from a number of left-leaning Latin American countries as well as formation of digitized geopolitics like the creation of “European data cloud”; Chinese “Great Firewall”; Iranian “Halal Internet”.

We can define cyberspace as a single “domain”— equal to land, sea, air, and space— which to control every state has to build up digital fortresses and cyber defenses, leading to the imperative to dominate and rule this domain; to develop offensive capabilities to fight and win wars within cyberspace and to hold technological sovereignty.xiii The imperatives of mass surveillance and preparations for cyber-warfare across the globe have reoriented the defense industrial base and international coalitions. Following the Snowden storm, we can discuss how “Mass surveillance of the internet by intelligence agencies is ‘corrosive of online privacy’  and  threatens  to  undermine  privacy  law,  human  rights  law  and  right  of  data protection”xiv. It is interesting to explore how the power relations are intersecting each other and blurring thereafter. With a particular stress on the concept of ‘cyber-sovereignty’ and ‘digital subject’, It ventures into the discussion how ‘mass surveillance and digital espionage’ and resistance towards it increasingly becomes an integral part of everyday life. Bringing Kafka into the scene, we can tease out how people through electronic surveillance over innocent metadata are subjected to anything nearly as extreme like Josef K. in The Trial. The words of the attorney and author John W Whitehead about the US National Security Agency scandal in an article headlined “Kafka’s America” is worth quoting in this context:

We now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of Swat police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted. Indeed, this is Kafka’s nightmare and it is slowly becoming America’s reality. Social networking and social life have to be renarrated in the encounter with everyday surveillance. It is apparent that social selves are, in a sense, co- produces with the surveillance state. The Bangladeshi American artist Hasan M Elahi has produces a digital installation that poignantly critiques this co- production of the self through surveillance. After he was detained in 2002 and informed that he was on a terrorist watch list, he produced an installation that recorded all of his daily activities and whereabouts, titled “hiding in Plain Sight”.

Coming back to the terminology of New Literature, we can cite the definition as given in the homepage of Philologisch-Historische Fakultät Anglistik/Americanistik of Universität Ausburg, “The term New English Literatures (NEL) refers to the anglophone literatures of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania, and Canada. The field has direct overlaps with English Studies, for instance by including Black and Asian British literatures as well as travel writing; via Canadian literatures, it is also closely linked to the field of North American studies, a special focus in the Augsburg NEL”. U.Anto Maria Eusobia has saidxvii, “The label of “New Literatures” includes the literary productions of a geographically and culturally vast and non-contiguous area that includes the former British colonies (for example, from Canada to Australia, from Singapore to Pakistan and India)” (Eusobia 13). Some critics debate whether or not to include the USA in this area, although their independence from Britain in the eighteenth century and the position of world power that they have enjoyed have led many to exclude them. Colin J. Bennett, Andrew Clement and Kate Milberry in their editorial of “Introduction to Cyber-Surveillance” has commented.

The rapid expansion of digital networking and especially the Internet over the past two decades has been a boon for the many intensive activities that facilitate and increasingly constitute contemporary social, economic, political and cultural life. Access to information and the means to produce information have grown dramatically, enabling both individual empowerment and democratic participation.

They have commented upon how the “Digital mediation is transforming the design, production, marketing, distribution and consumption of a widening array of goods and services” (Bennet, Clement and Milberry 339) and how “The Internet provides a platform for active involvement in campaigns, groups, movements and political activism, allows individuals to disseminate the fruits of their creation to the world at virtually no cost, and enables the instantaneous search of volumes of data.

4. Literature in Cyberspace: A Study:

As Piret Viires has told in his essay titled “Literature in Cyberspace”,Contemporary society has become an information society and hence it makes sense to interpret various changes in the cultural sphere. Connections between computer technology and literature are one aspect of the complicated global set of problems in tackling the adaptation of texts with the media.

The focus should be as Viires has argued that, what happens with literary texts in cyberspace, how they adapt to that environment, and it examines the forms of “cyberliterature”. The most comprehensive definition of cyberliterature derives from the concept of digital literature, i.e. literature created on the computer and presented by means of the computer. Trying to narrow the concept of cyberliterature, it can be characterised by certain computer-specific qualities: multilinearity, lexias (blocks of text connected with various hypertext links) joined by links, linking a written text with multi-media, interactivity, etc.

Viires has defined the notion of ‘cyberliterature’ in following termsxxii: “In narrower terms, the concept of cyberliterature can be characterised by certain computer-specific qualities: multilinearity, lexias (blocks of text connected with various hypertext links) joined by links, linking a written text with multi-media, interactivity, etc.” (154) Today critics advocate post- Panoptical theories to understand the modern day complicacies of cyberculture. The leading thinkers in this field are Deleuze and Guttari who by describing the Foucault’s Panopticon theory indicate how the nature of surveillance is changing with capitalism, big corporate and globalization. If Foucault is the founding father of Panoptican literature then Deleuze is the father of post-Panoptican literature. According to Deleuze, individuals lose their relevance as subjects of surveillance as individuals become a repository of data which represent their purchasing power and consumerism.

Bennett, Clement and Milberry has noted that, “that many recent books in this literature do not tend to see cyber-surveillance as a separate issue or concern, at least if judged by the crude measure of chapter headings and index references (e.g. Zureik and Salter 2005; Haggerty and Ericson 2006; Monahan 2006; Lyon 2007; Ball, Haggerty & Lyon 2012)”xxiv (341). Digitally mediated surveillance (DMS) is gradually more widespread, but unseen in the daily chores of life. As we work, play and parley between public and private places, both online and offline, we construct an increasing torrent of private digital records of curiosity to invisible others. CCTV cameras trace our activities in public space, as well as in the workplace. MNCs track our activities as we surf social cyberspaces, data mines our digital self and produce users as commodities for trade with the maximum bidder. Governments too persist to accumulate personal information on-line (i.e., Aadhar in India) with unclear guiding principles for preservation and utilize, while law enforcement more and more use internet technology to keep an eye not only on criminals but protesters and political nonconformists as well, with troublesome allegations against so called ‘democracy’.

Zeynep Tufekci in his essay titled “Is the internet good or bad?” projects our helpless condition in such a digital world which he calls it as ‘fragmented media landscape’. In other words we are existing in the world of surveillance where each of our activities or steps are recorded or watched out by the Internet and Telecommunication agencies monitored by the government and corporate agencies. So the main question he hits in the essay is the question of privacy and freedom of living in the digital environment. The right to privacy is the same as right to speech which is totally gone out of the society. Another issue he states that how digital communication had become a form of organization for promoting the public events such as public protest and with the help of new technology a small street movement is getting expanded its horizon with a fraction of second and thereby getting its influence and support from all over the world. Another important issue of the essay is the use of digital media of the political organization for promoting their political campaign and the different companies for selling their products.

6. Objectives of the Module 

So from this module we have learnt about the concepts like cyberspace, surveillance and the relation in between these two. We have tried to approach the cultural and aesthetic implications of ubiquitous surveillance in a historical perspective and critically engage with the notions like tracking, surveillance, panopticon, sousveillance etc. We can end with Robert Viiresxxvii, “Cyberliterature could therefore serve as an umbrella term which could tentatively be divided in three: (i) All literary texts available in the Internet (WWW). This term covers prose or poetry texts available at the home pages of professional writers; anthologies of prose or poetry published and digitized; collections of classical texts (e.g. Project Gutenberg ); online literature magazines (e.g. Ninniku), etc. (ii) Non-professional literary texts available at the Internet, which inclusion in literary analysis expands the boundaries of traditional literature. Here the net functions first and foremost as an independent place of publication. The term would cover home pages of amateur writers, groups of unrecognised young authors and their portals (e.g. Kloaak). Here we might also include peripheries of literature, such as fanfiction or blogs describing people’s daily life, also text-based role-playing games and collective online novels. (iii) Hypertext literature and cybertexts. These would include  literary texts of more complex structure, which exploit various hypertext solutions, but also intricate multimedia cybertexts. Such cybertexts would be the most authentic example of multimedia artifacts, merging literature, visual arts, film, music.”

Reference:

• Bauman, Zygmunt et al. (2014) “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance. International Political Sociology”
• Boyne, Roy (2000). Post-Panopticism, Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 2, 285-307.
• Deibert, Ronald “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace After Snowden – 2015”
• Foucault, Michel (1985). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Viires, Piret. “Literature in Cyberspce”, Folklore Vol. 29.
• Whitehead, John W. (2013) “Kafka’s America: Secret Courts, Secret Laws, and Total Surveillance”, The Rutherford Institute.