Surveillance Culture Quotes

Tweets? That stuff kills conversation. And people taking pictures with their phone or recording you, sometimes surreptitiously, is creepy. They come up and just start talking to you, and you can see the red light on their phone.

We're kind of in a voyeuristic world. We have TV shows that are all about watching people do weird things in houses. People are obsessed with that. There's live coverage of it.

Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.

With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance.

Camera phones threaten to turn everyone into amateur paparazzi. We are witnessing our personal space shrink because of the way technology is being used.

The U-Tube Moment: The cameras are always on.

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

In my opinion, you don't get to have privacy when you're only 16!

I apologize to all of my colleagues who've been writing up storms, but as a culture we've essentially put ourselves into a position where Mark Zuckerberg can say, "Privacy as a social norm is no longer relevant," and a lot of people don't blink an eye.

I think I'm slightly older than the generation that was really bred on social media - I had Facebook in high school, but I was growing up in a time where these things were relatively new, and every generation below me is growing up having every single thing they do seen. And that is kind of frightening.

By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

The social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy, but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as benign while the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly defines everyone as either a snitch or a terrorist.

It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

All I can say is that I did admire 'The Lives of Others', which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.

Representation is a sort of surveillance.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Going to public events and getting searched is not a normal event in a free society. We are growing up with a generation of young people who accept the wand and the metal detector.

Radical transparency has an enormous impact on our personal lives. We can no longer share thoughts, quips, photos or personal opinions anywhere on the web without being mindful that they may turn up where we least expect it (notably job interviews, divorce proceedings or public media).

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.

I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.

With camera phones and, you know, iPad's and cameras at stoplights, it's like I just want to drive around with a bag on my head because I just feel like everyone's watching.

What I do think is important is this idea of a 'privacy native' where you grow up in a world where the values of privacy are very different. So it's not that I'm against privacy but that the values around privacy are very different for me and for people who are younger than my parent's generation, for whom it's weird to live in a glass house.