‘Watch us Wander’: Mobile Surveillance and the Surveillance of Mobility

Abstract

Social relations between geographically distant and mobile individuals are increasingly mediated through new information and communication technologies. In this paper I argue that the configuration of these mobile social relations can be understood through a model of interpersonal surveillance that, unlike hierarchical state structures of surveillance, constitutes a decentralised social relation between individuals. This shift may be characterised in the writings of Foucault as a move from the panopticon model of surveillance that mediates the relation between the state and the individual to his later writings on technologies of the self, which emphasise interaction between individuals as a source of self-discipline. Like the panopticon, this second form of surveillance also constitutes a power/knowledge regime that produces certain ways of seeing and certain objects of the ‘surveilling’ gaze. Drawing on empirical material from research on round-the-world travel websites, in this paper I outline the way metaphors of surveillance such as ‘watching’ and ‘following’ configure the mobile social relations that occur between travellers and their on-line audience.