John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, eds., SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
S urveillance studies is a new area of research and intellectual inquiry drawing from numerous scholarly disciplines including sociology, political science, and communications.Many books and articles have recently been published on surveillance practices, though not many of these monographs have been aimed toward first year students or other nonspecialist audiences.SuperVision provides an accessible introduction to issues in surveillance studies, assessing the pervasive growth of surveillance practices across the globe today.SuperVision is organized around ten "big ideas" that each chapter takes up to varying degrees.First, Gilliom and Monahan argue that established terminology such as privacy and Big Brother are no longer helpful for understanding how surveillance operates today.Second, not all surveillance is bad.Some of it, they argue, makes aspects of our lives more convenient and efficient.Third, not all surveillance is state surveillance.Private players are equally prominent on the surveillance stage.Fourth, surveillance not only entails us being watched by others but involves us watching others, which in turn shapes our sense of self.Fifth, not all surveillance is forced upon us.Some of it is participatory.Sixth, surveillance allows information to go many places faster than ever before, which in effect shrinks time and space.Seventh, surveillance is resisted.Not everyone participates in it or thinks it is a good thing.Eighth, surveillance can extend and intensify social inequality.To explain this point, Gilliom and Monahan focus on racism and discrimination in some chapters of SuperVision.Ninth, surveillance systems today involve cuttingedge technology.But elaborate and expensive monitoring systems fail as often as they work well.And finally, formal organizations are hungry for information.Collection and analysis of personal information is something that all formal organizations do.The first chapter in SuperVision examines the relationship between surveillance and the self, arguing that the kinds of surveillance we are subject to and participate in shape us as people.In the words of the authors, "cell phones are the perfect symbol of the surveillance society" (p.11).They collect and relay information about us almost endlessly to an
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".