Watch Man

Watch Man

is a political game that against surveillance system. 

Methodology

The surveillance experience in China triggered my curiosity towards this phenomenon and historical background, the Game “Watch Man” based on the research of “Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon Books, in English,1975)”, “Josh Lauer, Surveillance history and the history of new media: An evidential paradigm (SAGA journals new media & society 2011)” and “Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (OR Books 2012)”. It’s aim to discover the connection in between Mass-Surveillance, Self-Surveillance and Self Exposure. 

- The origin of Camera surveillance 

The Camera use as a surveillance tool can be trace back to nineteenth-century, base on Josh Lauer’s research, it’s all start with the portable camera. The portable camera was first introduced in 1880s, US. The convenience of portable camera makes it easier to take photos without people knowing it, as Lauer’s

- Panopticon and CCTV 

Foucault described “The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. ” It’s similar to CCTV, the power relationship is clear in the condition of watch and being watch. The surveillance system continuously judge and change citizen’s behavior to reach the standards set by those in power. 

- The mass surveillance and self exposure 

Nowadays mass surveillance technology not only applying by the public CCTV cameras, also private surveillance and potentially private mass collection of data. As Jeremie Zimmermann suggest in the book Cypherpunks “It’s not only the state-sponsored surveillance, it’s the question of privacy, the way data is being handled by third parties and the knowledge that people have of what is being done with the data...with Facebook you see the behavior of users who are very happy to hand out any kind of personal data, and can you blame people for not knowing where the limit is between privacy and publicity?” Here, I ask whether Facebook's success is based on human self exposed behaviors, and what prompted such behaviors? Jeremie Zimmermann later suggest that “Facebook makes its business by blurring the line between privacy, friends, and publicity. ” Meanwhile, Julian Assange added “Even this line between government and corporation is blurred. If you look at the expansion in the military contractor sector in the West over the past ten years, the NSA, which was the biggest spy agency in the world, had ten primary contractors on its books that it worked with. Two years ago it had over 1,000. So there is a smearing out of the border between what is government and what is the private sector.” Zimmermann argue with the access of all the google and facebook storage data, these third parties can be the extension of US spying agencies.