Terror x Fear = Business Opportunity

The 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, FLA is an important moment in the history of surveillance. Using a software program called FaceIt™ (developed by the Visionics Corporation), local police strategically placed video surveillance cameras in key locations to scan the faces of thousands of ticket holders entering the stadium. No arrests were made but the [...]

FLICKr and Counter-Surveillance: Resistance or Reification?

Cory Doctorow posts on Boing Boing that two civil society organizations – The Open Rights Group and No2ID – are calling for British citizens to snap pictures of moments or things in their daily lives which capture the expanding nature of the surveillance society. The pics are to then be uploaded to a Flickr site.
Here’s [...]

Purple Pills and Puffery

This post is about promotionalism and the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the ideas come from a paper I wrote a couple of years ago (This Ad May be Bad for Your Health) published as a chapter in my book Communication in Question. I was compelled to revisit some of the ideas that informed the paper [...]

Opt in/Opt out? Consumers Benefit from Surveillance Backlash

In January 2006, the Bush administration came under intense criticism for authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct electronic (soft) surveillance on citizens’ telephone and Internet correspondence without court approval. The NSA’s ability to monitor the daily communications of U.S. citizens was made possible by the willing participation of some of the largest telecommunications [...]

Thank You for Smoking

In what must be a sign that public health advocates are making big gains in the legal and PR battles against Big Tobacco, news today that the biggest cancer purveyor in the U.S., Philip Morris, has taken the City of San Francisco to court over a new bylaw banning sales of cigarettes in pharmacies.

The company [...]

Corporate Responsibility or Gratuitous Greenwashing?

Let the countdown begin: it’s 3 days to the grand opening of the new California Academy of Sciences museum, a state of the art spectacle of architecture and sustainability. It’s truly an impressive achievement. Visit the website and you’ll see for yourself: a 2.5 acre “living roof” that’s home to 1.7 million native plants; insulation made [...]

Surveillance News – Hamilton Gets More Eyes in the Sky

Is Canada becoming England’s mini-me? A colleague in the surveillance studies community published a paper a few years ago speculating on whether Canada was sliding towards a Big Brother surveillance society in the guise of its colonial Motherland. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of cameras that dot Britain’s urban landscapes far surpass anything on [...]

Crisis & Empathy Goffman Style

I’ve been thinking a lot about Maple Leaf Foods and its crisis communication response following the listeria outbreak. I’ve posted about the political dimensions of this event already, but even while working through these reactions I was having a hard time reconciling: (a) my admiration for how the company handled the crisis (admiration in terms [...]

Disease Surveillance 2.0

In the first meeting of my grad seminar on communication and public health we discussed the contributions of some leading social theorists (Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), particularly their theories of governmentality (Foucault), risk (Beck, Giddens) and reflexivity (also Beck, Giddens).
A recent story in Wired magazine illustrates some of these ideas well. The piece [...]

Politicizing the public service a danger to public health

Two news items today worth noting. The first story, from the front page of the Ottawa Citizen, reports that the Tories have clamped down on public servants during the election, “muzzling” them from speaking at conferences, to scientific meetings, or in other public engagements. The story quotes Myriam Massabki, a spokesperson with the Privy Council [...]