[acc-cca-l] Upcoming Digital Synergies webinar - Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty in Governing

[Gordon Gow]

[△EXTERNAL]


Please join us on October 25 at 12:00pm (Mountain Time) as Jeff Heydon discusses his new book Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty in Governing

Click here to register in advance for this Zoom event<https://ualberta-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvd-muqD8jE9SzfFdb8qUl0qLmtEfCzGQr>

One of the more compelling things about electronic media is the way it presents itself to us. McLuhan and Baudrillard wrestled with this question in the second half of the twentieth century. For McLuhan, the question revolved around our experience of electronic images and the way they seemed to be immediate – both in proximity and temporality. For Baudrillard, the issue was the adjustment to experienced reality for those exposed and the subsequent effect on the overall culture.

This matters for us because electric media – and electronically produced images in particular – has achieved a level of ubiquity in Western culture that positions it as expected. It is expected in social elements of everyday life, but it is also expected in institutional areas of everyday life. The focus of Visibility and Control is the presumed indisputability of camera produced images and what that means for inquiries into government practices – particularly criminal charges and prosecutions. Are images as self-evident as they appear to be and what does the answer to that question do to the use of images in court proceedings or police practices? It is no longer debated with any seriousness whether surveillant images should exist or not. What is open to interpretation is whether the image carries more weight than eye-witness accounts or tangible forensic residue. And the logical follow-up concern is whether this means that a primary modality of establishing fact has left the confines of the courts and the lab and surfaced in the forms of the CCTV camera, the smartphone, and the drone."

Jeff Heydon is author of Visibility and Control: Cameras and Certainty in Governing (Lexington Books, 2021) and is co-chair of the New Media and Digital Cultures working group at the Cultural Studies Association. He teaches in the Communication Studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University.
[image.png]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gordon A. Gow, PhD
Professor, Sociology/Media & Technology Studies
Graduate Coordinator, Communications and Technology Graduate Program (MACT)
Adjunct Professor, Peter Lougheed Leadership College
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

The University of Alberta is located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty 6 territory and the territory of the Papaschase and the Métis Nation
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.ucalgary.ca/pipermail/acc-cca-l/attachments/20211006/8fa6526f/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 187655 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mailman.ucalgary.ca/pipermail/acc-cca-l/attachments/20211006/8fa6526f/attachment.png>