With the greatest respect to Katina Michael and others who use the term in Australia, I don't get 'uberveillance' - and I know I am not the only one outside of their particular research group in Australia.
First of all, it doesn't work linguistically: 'uber-' (German prefix) + 'veillance' (French). And 'uber' just means the same as 'sur' in French anyway, i.e.: 'above' or 'over'... so the world 'surveillance' has been reconstructed by replacing the French prefix with a German one. Is German supposed to be 'stronger' than French?
Now, Katina and friends seem to use this to refer to the combination of ubiquitous or pervasive computing (or what is often called 'ambient intelligence' (AmI for short) in Europe) with surveillance. Most of us quite happily just use the terms 'pervasive surveillance' or 'ubiquitous surveillance' - and since ubicomp is the developer shorthand for ubiquitous computing, I've been using the term 'ubisurv' for the last few years (that's a neologism too, of course). One could also use 'ambient surveillance' (which I have seen quite a bit, or AmS for short if you follow that particular developer shorthand).
If 'uber' is actually intended to refer to 'ubiquitous' (from the Latin, 'ubique' - 'everywhere' - as adapted as 'ubik' in Phillip K. Dick's excellent novel) then 'ubi-' ('every') is the way to reduce the word. It also sounds and reads better (to my ears at least). Ubiveillance would make more sense if you are trying to refer to a change in the quality of surveillance from panoptic to pervasive, from predominantly exterior to more interior.
I know we social scientists like to invent new terms and like to be the ones credited with inventing them, but 'uberveillance' just doesn't make sense to me. Sorry.
So my question is why 'uberveillance'? Am I getting its derivation wrong? Is there something I am missing. I'd really like to know! I think there are quite a few others who have been receiving these messages about 'uberveillance' who would too...
Yours, slightly puzzled...
David
Dr David Murakami Wood
ESRC Research Fellow, Global Urban Research Unit | Visiting Scholar, Postgraduate Program in Urban Management
Newcastle University, UK | Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil
e-mail: [log in to unmask] | website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/guru/staff/profile/d.f.j.wood | blog: http://ubisurv.wordpress.com
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From: Research and teaching on surveillance [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Katina Michael [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 02 March 2009 03:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Uberveillance: Microchipping People and the Assault on Privacy
Hi Surveillance List,
Please find in this month's Quadrant Magazine (shortly to go online):
"Uberveillance: Microchipping People and the Assault on Privacy"
MG Michael and Katina Michael
March 2009
pp. 85-89
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