Toward everyday negotiation and resistance under data-driven surveillance

As sociologist David Lyon describes, we are now living in a "surveillance society" where surveillance has bled into every aspect of our daily activities, from macro-level Covid-19 contact tracing to micro-level personal health data self-tracking. More than ever, our ways of feeling, being, and living have been quantified, collected, and aggregated by technologies and across institutions, which in effect feeds into various types of social control, classification, and domination. With the prevalence of the Foucauldian trope of the panopticon, such data-driven surveillance seems so coercive that our bodies and movement become hypervisible and subject to scrutiny. Indeed, a growing amount of scholarship in HCI, CSCW, and neighboring fields has warned how varied modes of surveillance and automation perpetuate existing modes of oppression and exploitation along the lines of gender, race, and class. In this vein, data representation is often positioned as the "truth" and evidence of our bodies and selves, and it is often impossible to opt out of surveillance society and its regime of data governance and control. This work asks. How do individuals organize and navigate everyday encounters with data-driven surveillance? Where do the possibilities for negotiation and resistance He? This article is a call to action for us to denaturalize the tendency to see data-driven surveillance technologies as omnipotent and totalitarian with little to no opportunity for the surveilled to fight for control (or where the surveilled remain docile and disciplined). Here, Lu discuss two cases from my past research investigating how individuals interact with data-driven surveillance technologies in different sites and contexts: the macro-level state surveillance of political communication in China and the meso-level behavior surveillance in classrooms.