Dr Tyne Sumner will deliver the seventh CRISP online seminar on Wednesday 6th November from 14.00 - 15.30 GMT. The seminar is entitled 'Gimmick Surveillance: Espionage, Exposure, Entertainment'. To join the seminar, just click on the 'Join the Seminar' button below from 15 minutes before the start time. See you there! 

Abstract

The term ‘gimmick’ has been invoked a great deal recently to describe futuristic products that normalise aggressive data collection under the guise of novelty and personalisation. While many technological gimmicks—from hologram prototypes to the use of virtual reality headsets in educational settings—are often characterised as benign innovations, other ‘smart home’ devices have faced considerable critique for their use of playfulness or convenience as a cover for domestic spying. Taking some recent technological gimmicks as its starting point, this talk examines the relationship between surveillance, entertainment, and gimmick in range of cultural formations that present surveillance as a novelty commodity. Drawing on cultural theorist and literary critic Sianne Ngai’s theory of the ‘gimmick,’ in which gimmicks are ‘overrated devices’ that work both ‘too little’ and ‘too hard,’ I examine how several recent cultural forms display a deliberately non-reflexive, or ambivalent, attitude towards contemporary surveillance technologies in exchange for staging surveillance as a gimmick for mainstream public consumption. I ask what the increasing prevalence of this attitude means for surveillance studies and public attitudes to data collection, privacy, and government monitoring.

Speaker Biography

Website: tynedaile.com

Research Profile: https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tyne-daile-sumner

Tyne is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in English & Digital Humanities at the Australian National University. Her primary research areas are C20th and C21st literature, surveillance studies, and digital humanities. She also has expertise in poetry and poetics, critical infrastructure studies, and digital culture. Her current project is SurveiLit, which examines the representation of new and emerging forms of surveillance in contemporary global literature. She has published widely on topics ranging from facial recognition technology and surveillance software to Australian poetry and cultural databases. Tyne is President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) and is on the international steering committee of the Art, AI & Digital Ethics research collective.

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