Metaphors of Surveillance
There’s a new study looking at the metaphors we use to describe surveillance.
Over 62 days between December and February, we combed through 133 articles by 105 different authors and over 60 news outlets. We found that 91 percent of the articles contained metaphors about surveillance. There is rich thematic diversity in the types of metaphors that are used, but there is also a failure of imagination in using literature to describe surveillance.
Over 9 percent of the articles in our study contained metaphors related to the act of collection; 8 percent to literature (more on that later); about 6 percent to nautical themes; and more than 3 percent to authoritarian regimes.
On the one hand, journalists and bloggers have been extremely creative in attempting to describe government surveillance, for example, by using a variety of metaphors related to the act of collection: sweep, harvest, gather, scoop, glean, pluck, trap. These also include nautical metaphors, such as trawling, tentacles, harbor, net, and inundation. These metaphors seem to fit with data and information flows.
The only literature metaphor used is the book 1984.
This is sad. I agree with Daniel Solove that Kafka’s The Trial is a much better literary metaphor. This article suggests some other literary metaphors, most notably Philip K. Dick. And this one suggests the Eye of Sauron.
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conrad • April 18, 2014 2:44 PM
I taped a printed Eye of Sauron over the camera lens on my laptop. Two reasons – it blocks video recording, and reminds me that someone is recording my other computer activities.