Five Questions about Surveillance
I’ve spent most of the last few months hitting dead ends. I have a book proposal that’s long overdue for my agent, and this is partly because the thing I want to write a book about keeps slipping out of my reach. I have a really intriguing beginning, and a very satisfying end, but the middle is a mystery to me at the moment. This is encouraging, as it makes me think I’m looking at something that is under-studied at the moment, but it makes the research process frustrating.
There was a great interview with Malcolm Gladwell in the New Statesman last month, which slightly rehabilitates him after the brickbats he got for his last book. I love this quote most of all, about the challenge of writing popular books about ideas and history:
“At some point I’d like to write a book that didn’t have any theory. If I could write a book like Michael Lewis’s, where the ideas are there but exist entirely within the context of character, and the intellectual part recedes entirely into the background – that is the gold standard for me.”
This is a really high bar to aim for - the kind of book that is brimming with new ideas, but is driven purely by protagonists and action, not exposition and theory. The kind of book that gets made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, rather than the kind of book people buy because they feel like they should read it, but never actually get around to it.
Back in December, I took my levels of book writing procrastination to a new level. Not only was I not writing my book (or this newsletter), but I accepted an offer from a friend for some paid work doing a development edit on his book. It’s a book about some of the same themes - the media industries, disruption, and attention - but comes from far more of an economics perspective. But as writing avoidance tactics go, accepting his offer was a new level. There should be a saying - if you want to get some writing done, ask a writer who is struggling with their own book.
On the positive side, editing his book has helped me rediscover the discipline of writing, and how much more I enjoy editing to writing. Getting the stuff on the page for the first time is by far the hardest part. If I could pay someone to take all of the half-formed thoughts in my head and put them into Google Docs, I’d be very happy spending the next few months polishing the words till they shine. As we’ve discussed the book over lunched in Brighton, I’ve really enjoyed starting to recognise the structures, metaphors and callbacks, helping him tease these out to make them more like a Gladwell, and less like an academic paper. There’s a fantastic book sitting there, and it’s been really satisfying helping to pull it into shape.
Finishing the development edit this week has given me the impetus to dive back into the research for my book. At the moment, there are five questions that I’m interested in, and I’m starting to do the deep research to answer them. Over the next few months, I’ll share what I’m finding in more of a scrapbook style on this newsletter. I started this newsletter as if I was writing fully formed articles, but as I’ve subscribed to more Substack newsletters, I’ve preferred more informal and open-ended writing. Newsletters that feel like early blogging - an open and lightly formed exchange of ideas - are more fun than an Atlantic article in an email.
I’d like to turn this into more of a conversation. So here’s five things I’m thinking about at the moment. If you’ve got thoughts on this, or leads for potential books or sources to research, I’d love to hear from you.
1 - When did we first let companies listen to us in our living rooms?
I’ve been researching the history of surveillance, and am looking forward to Brian Hochman’s forthcoming book, but a lot of research is about state or criminal surveillance. I’m interested in how we started letting companies listen to us, as part of their need to track our behaviour and sell it to advertisers.
2 - How did companies imagine the living room in the 20th century?
In an earlier newsletter I wrote about James Robinson’s excellent research on how newsrooms and journalists imagined their audience. Having worked in large media organisations, I know there is a kind of folk memory of the audience at the heart of mass media. When the audience is invisible, we have to imagine them, and I’m curious how different groups - creatives, advertisers, regulators, etc - thought about the audience and what we were doing as they were trying to get our attention.
3 - How did regulation stop companies surveilling us in our homes?
Most of the writing about surveillance is about public space. There’s a lot of academic research on surveillance in cities and CCTV, but less on surveillance in the home. I’ve found a few interesting recent articles about Ring cameras, and a few piece on the rise of the Nanny Cam at the end of the last century. I’m curious about whether commercial surveillance in our homes was regulated as much as surveillance of us in public. I don’t think it was.
4 - How have we imagined and responded to surveillance in our homes?
Just as companies have to create stories and myths about what we do in our living rooms, so we - the audience at home - have created myths about what technology knows about us. There is a vivid history of psychological conditions mapping on to the technologies of the time. First, we thought the telephone was listening to us. Then it was the radio and the television. Now it’s Alexa and Siri.
5 - Why do we talk about public media when we consume it in private?
This is something that occurred to me as I’ve been reading Paul Starr’s magisterial ‘The Creation Of The Media’. This is an epic account of how media technologies have created public space over the last few centuries. But after telegraph, which was never a widespread domestic technology, most of the others he discusses - the telephone, radio, television and the internet - were mostly consumed in domestic settings. In other words, we talk about public media as if it was an agora - a public space that we travelled to for debate and learning. But really, the history of public media is the opposite - for the first time in history, the agora came to us, in our living rooms.
Alongside all this is my continuing effort to research the life of Arthur Nielsen, and his role in all the questions above. If there’s a chance that my book could be more like Gladwell’s description of Michael Lewis’ book - driven by narrative rather than theory - then Nielsen is the most likely protagonist at the moment. The friend who asked me to edit his book has put me in touch with someone who might be able to let me have access to the Nielsen archives. Fingers crossed.