Hi,
Re Derrick Cameron's suggestion on pagers, read the following passage:

'Meanwhile, in Kent, the newest of technologies will be tested by the
Home Office. Defendants will have to carry "voice-track" pagers so they
can be monitored as they move around the county. A sample of the
criminal's voice will be taken and held in a central computer, says Dick
Whitfield, Kent's chief probation officer. Offenders will be given BT
pagers that bleep when officers want to find out where they are. They
will then phone a free phone number and talk for the thirty seconds
needed for the computer to establish the identiy and location of the
caller. I think even the most reactionary readers will agree that it is
a cruel and unusual punishment to treat decent criminals as if they were
members of the Parliamentary Labour Party.'

That is from Nick Cohen, 'Cruel Britannia' (Verso,1999 - beg,borrow or
steal; as they say)a collection of his journalism (for the Observer and
the Independent)(p.114).

Talking of labour MPs, my former contribution to this website elicited
some interesting transcripts concerning how the Treasury were
confronting the social exclusion problem - this required a re-thinking
of common 'misconceptions'. Patricia Hewitt MP, economic secretary to
the treasury, observed that it was not the case that Banks routinely
excluded people from socially deprived areas with no jobs, from opening
accounts. In fact they have always welcomed poor people with open arms.
The fact that all these members of the underclass and denizens of sink
estates (the "dark heart" of Britain - see my earlier
contribution)haven't got bank accounts is entirely because they have
chosen to be 'self-excluded'. These poor self excluded people need to be
rescued from the perils of benefit culture and a cash economy (this is
the new terminology for black market - slowly any use of cash, which is
so much more difficult to monitor than an electronic transaction, is
being demonised). Thus the banks will go forth and bring the lost sheep
back into the fold. People will get their benefit paid into a bank
account and their financial transactions will thus be rendered
transparent - and another area of collective consciousness resistant to
the state will be neutralised. Of course, the Government may just try
and replace benefit cheques with vouchers - a system being given a trial
run with asylum seekers (although surely too low tech for new labour -
and so obviously prone to fraud that any old fool could predict serious
irregularities cropping up - not least the fact that you can sell
vouchers).

Mary's mention of the Norris and Armstrong book, 'The Maximum
Surveillance Society' reminded me of Gary Armstrong's previous book
'Football Hooligans: knowing the score' (Berg,1998)which discusses, to
some extent, surveillance of so-called hooligans but also by trying to
make sense of the collective experience of football fans, combats the
reduction of experience to information in an electronic media society.
This reduction is the same whether the subject is socially included or
excluded. For example, the pagers work the same for MPs as for criminals
-but we see them as functioning very differently. For the criminals, we
see it as external control of outsiders (the socially excluded in
general)- for the MPs we see it as internalised control, as somehow
controlling and focusing internal consciouness such that
self-surveillance and self-censorship are created (surveillance for the
socially included). Such is the emphasis we place on this second one
(because we live in the socially inclusive world) that it is easy to
miss that it is just the flipside of the coin to the other. This is a
pervasive problem. If for example you suggest in reply to a conference
paper concerning the surveillance of childhood, that the pressures to
curtail your children's freedom are not purely internal pressures but
also external (peer pressure and institutional -schools, social services
- pressure driven by reactinary ideology) you can be accused of simply
not understanding the issue. However, there is no prospect of
understanding internal surveillance, self-censorship etc., if it is not
recognised that these are the internalisations of external surveillance.
To this end, I think it is a mistake to constantly try and say things
like, "we're not going to support any Big Brother style visions of
surveillance." Orwell's book is one of the best understandings of the
dyadic principles of social exclusion/inclusion and external/internal
surveillance that we have. Winston Smith is not in the position he is
because of the extreme external surveillance but because of the way that
he has so successfully internalised all the external control. The
depressing nature of the book is due to the fact that he can't escape
because all his conscious attempts to do so are driven by these
internalised drives. Such that his moment in the country with Julia is
like something out of a 1930s German sexpol film (its purely a construct
of the totalitarian consciousness) - all his conscious efforts can only
lead in one direction to the love of Big Brother (actually this makes
the book very funny in a Kafkaesque mannner). Just as if we work
entirely within the realm of internalised surveillance, stay within
those constraints, we can only end up loving Blair. You can see this in
t6he way a section of the left defected over Kosovo. Its the ultimate
destination of, say, the Marxism Today crowd. What Orwell understood to
be the fate of all deracinated intellectuals. Hope lies in the proles
precisely because they represent a source of collective experience which
hasn't internalised surveillance values. The reason I study Orwell and
Mass-Observation is because they understood this and they provide models
for combatting surveillance or textuality or literature or whatever
terminology you want to use. So I submit, we should be talking about Big
Brother while its still possible.
Nick Hubble
[log in to unmask]
GRC Humanities, Arts B, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton.




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