The Eavesdropper and Onlooker as Proximate Agents of Social Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eavesdropper and the onlooker have become models of activist potential. Their proximity to enactments of racist and gendered social violence, and their abilities to witness, record and disseminate records of this violence via smartphones and social media networks, define some of the conditions for social change around the situations in which bystanders are located online. Drawing from John Peters’ analysis of eavesdropping as the transformation of private talk into public communication, this article examines the contemporary activist reclamation of eavesdropping and onlooking as small-scale, networked conditions of social transformation. Imagined as small acts of intervention tied to participation in contemporary social media environments, their models of social change leverage the positionality of the eavesdropper and the onlooker, transforming the “listening in” that people do on social media and elsewhere into acts of agentic response. In the process, they recode the conditions in which harm is enacted from being surveilled online into conditions that also enable activist intervention.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".