We Liked to Watch

Television as Progenitor of the Surveillance Society

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9775255
AutoresJoshua Meyrowitz (Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen625
Número1
Páginas32-48
Fecha de publicación2009-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-7162 • E-ISSN: 1552-3349
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0002716209339576
OpenAlexW2100279657
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas11

The rise of mass television allowed hundreds of millions of people to closely watch other people and places on a regular basis, anonymously and from afar. Television watching altered the balance of what different types of people knew about each other and relative to each other, blurred the dividing line between public and private behaviors, and weakened the link between physical location and access to social experience. In these ways, television contributed to the reshuffling of previously taken-for-granted reciprocal social roles, including those related to age, gender, and authority. In cultivating its viewers into the normalcy of the acts of watching and of being watched, television experience also stimulated the widespread use of more recent interactive visual media, including the displays of self on social networking sites. Moreover, familiarity with television as a watching machine has fostered the otherwise surprising level of tolerance for increasingly pervasive government, corporate, and populace surveillance

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