A study just came out talking about how digital surveillance affects online rhetoric and I thought it provided some insight into Kuebrich’s essay. The study was published in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly by Elizabeth Stoycheff and she found that when people were “primed” (aka: reminded) that the government monitors digital communications they were significantly less likely to express minority political views, or really any views in contrast to the majority. We’ve talked in this class about how digital publics can be very polarizing and create an “echo chamber” effect when discussing political issues but this paper provides some evidence against that theory.
In his discussion of the surveillance cameras which were set to be installed in the Westside, Kuebrich stresses that the public outcry came not so much from the idea of the cameras but from how it was implemented without their input. They may not have been wildly fond of the idea, but the ‘real’ rhetorical issue was that the police opinion was being imposed on the community without its consent. However, this study (which was not out when Kubrich’s paper was written) suggests that there may be greater rhetorical consequences from the presence of the surveillance cameras themselves.
Kubrich’s paper later quotes Nancy Frasier when describing the meeting between police and Westside residents. There he observed a similar limitation of the residents minority opinions; “Meetings such as this are counterproductive when they become the bourgeois public sphere that Fraser critiques—a public sphere that superficially involves historically marginalized people, bracketing differences in power and becoming “the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new, hegemonic mode of domination”” (583). He talks about the softening of strong minority opinions when the weak community public interacts with the strong police public. Despite the presumably open forum for dialogue which was created when the police and the Westside met to address these issues, the introduction of the police into the Westside’s public space had an immediate effect on their rhetoric. Even when the topic of discussion was how the police power deprived Westside community members of their public rhetorical power they still felt implicitly that they could not voice those concerns.
If the effect of digital surveillance is as strong as Stoycheff suggests then the cameras which the Westside community so symbolically spoke out against could pose a tangible rhetorical threat. Installing surveillance cameras would extend that police strong public power to the entire neighborhood, subconsciously turning the Westside community’s home into a public sphere where their opinions are the minority. Simply the presence of surveillance cameras could cause the private transcript of the community to be silenced.
I think this study has some really unusual implications when thinking about broader political power structures and how they affect rhetoric. The typical conception of how political might changes public rhetoric is the 1984 example; the dominating political power actively chooses to silence minority dialogues and make counterpublics fearful of speaking out. But what if the actual process is much subtler? What if just the knowledge that our opinions are public causes us to oppress our own speech? A majority political power might take surveillance action benignly, without any intention of changing the minority dialogue (maybe even with the intent of being more welcome to, and more positively aware of said dialogue, knowing how difficult it is to hear private transcripts otherwise) and unknowingly cause it to conform itself to the power-majority rhetoric.
If you're interested here is The Independent article which discusses Stoycheff's study, and here is the study itself.
