@incollection{2020:postill:monitory_p,
title = {Monitory politics, digital surveillance and new protest movements: an analysis of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement},
year = {2020},
note = {In this article we seek to inject some dynamism and complexity into
the current scholarship on digital surveillance. Drawing from
ethnographic research in Hong Kong, we argue that digital surveillance
is a multi-directional endeavour with top-down, bottom-up and
horizontal dimensions. Therefore it cannot be reduced to desktop-down
portrayals of an almighty ‘surveillance state’ - not even in
advanced surveillance regimes like China’s. Instead we suggest that
digital surveillance practices must be set within a much larger,
dynamic system we describe as monitory politics, a type of political
action in which state and non-state actors surveil and shape one
another’s activities across a rapidly changing communicative
landscape. To develop this idea, we first provide a brief
methodological section based on our participant observation during the
2014 protests in Hong Kong, also known as the Umbrella Movement, after
which we review the existing literature on China’s surveillance
efforts. We then sketch an account of the protests, followed by a
discussion of the uncannily similar horizontal (or lateral)
surveillance practices of local people and the police. We conclude
that China’s ‘networked authoritarianism’ (MacKinnon 2011, 2012)
is far from being a perfect model of control, for numerous forms of
dissent and resistance survive in the country, with the Hong Kong
protests as a case in point.},
booktitle = {Soziologie des Digitalen - Digitale Soziologie?},
pages = {453--466},
edition = {1},
author = {Postill, John and Lasa, Victor and Zhang, Ge},
publisher = {Nomos},
address = {Baden-Baden},
series = {},
volume = {}
}