Darren Wershler posted a comment and link on my Facebook wall in response to the project Big Brother where art thou?, a collaboration with Lene Berg which circles around the popular trope ‘Facebook equals Big Brother’. Darren writes: “Big Brother’s the wrong surveillance model for Facebook. Phil Agre’s capture model works much better:”

In the linked article, Philip Agre defines five key differences between a surveillance model and a capture model as follows (clarifying that both models are intended as “metaphor systems and not as mutually exclusive categories”):

“1) The surveillance model employs visual metaphors, most famously Orwell’s “Big Brother is watching you”; the capture model employs linguistic metaphors by means of various grammars of actions.

2) The surveillance model emphasizes nondisruptive, surreptitious data collection; the capture model describes the readily apparent instrumentation that entails the reorganization of existing activities.

3) The surveillance model is concerned to mark off a “private” region by means of territorial metaphors of “invasion” and the like; the capture model portrays captured activities as being constructed in real-time from a set of institutionally standardized parts specified by the capture ontology.

4) The surveillance model depicts the monitoring of activity as centrally organized and presumes that the resulting information is centrally stored;
the capture model emphasizes the locally organized nature of contests over the capture process and their structuring within particular institutional contexts.

5) The surveillance model takes as its prototype the malevolent political activities of state organizations; the capture model takes as it’s prototype the quasi-philosophical project of ontological reconstruction undertaken by computer professionals in private organizations.”

Agre goes on to write:

“When applied as the sole framework for computing and privacy, the surveillance model contributes to the near-inevitability of oversimplified analysis. [Making me worry that we, here and now, are guilty of this.] For example, it has directed several authors’ attention to the rise of computer-mediated schemes for detailed monitoring of work activities, the idea being that distributed computer systems have the potential to establish a regime of total visibility through real-time digital representation of work activities. But while numerous workers have justly resented their experiences with such systems, the systems themselves are evolving, and the evidence is equivocal on their ubiquity, their effectiveness, and the degree of resentment they have provoked. Again, the point is not to identify a halfway position between extreme views, but to come to a more complicated appreciation of the actual dynamics of such developments. Unfortunately, all the surveillance model offers is a metaphor of bureaucratically organized state terror that often seems disproportionate to the actual experience of corporate life. The rhetoric of “Big Brother technologies” is easily – and frequently – ridiculed through paraphrase in terms of “sinister conspiracies” and the like. The paradoxical result is that genuinely worrisome developments can seem “not so bad” simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia.”

Of course Big Brother is not the perfect analogy for Facebook. (Though ‘nondisruptive, surreptitious data collection’ seems pretty spot on, as does ‘the monitoring of activity as centrally organized’ and the resulting information being ‘centrally stored.’) But, more to the point, Big Brother is simply the analogy I’ve seen used most often on Facebook itself. Why do inaccurate examples so often catch in the public imagination? Because they are simplistic and easy to remember? Or because they effectively encapsulate some larger truth or fear? Or simply because they are familiar?

All of this also has me wondering if Big Brother was ever a useful analogy for totalitarianism. How can a metaphor be effective propaganda against something, and a useful analogy to describe it, all at the same time?