Participating in ‘1984’: The Surveillance of Sousveillance from White Noise to Right Now

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that reading Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise alongside the emerging technologies of that pivotal year can help us better understand what I call the “surveillance of sousveillance”’ if we trace how those technologies have developed into our cultural moment now. Surveillance—being constantly monitored by “eye-in-the-sky” technology—today is now reciprocally complicated by what Steve Mann has termed sousveillance—monitoring back through “eyes-on-the-ground” technology. Where DeLillo’s novel comes in theoretical handy then is its reflection of a media-saturated society in a year that saw, as Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Macintosh commercial promised, “why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”’ The surveillance prophecy of George Orwell’s dystopia was replaced with a proto-sousveillance conceptualization which began to encourage interaction with the technologies feared to control us. What that looks like now, as DeLillo had already seen coming, is our culture built around “watching you” as much as it is around “watch me”. What I intend for this chapter is to consider DeLillo’s novel and its (not so) Orwellian year of 1984 in order to call attention to the ways we currently attempt sousveillant connections to the surveillance around us, the surveillance that we ourselves contribute to. Rather than categorize surveillance as only “them watching us,” I argue that it is just as much “us watching each other”; a clarification that nuances my idea that the surveillance of sousveillance constitutes our trend of being watchable to give others something to watch. Therefore, through specific applications of literary and media studies, my chapter contends that our cultural narratives are affected by not merely the surveillant gazes of multiple media, but our sousveillant desire to connect with those gazes.