Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction

It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday interactional practice and experience of being surveilled. To do so, it draws on Goffman’s account of the interaction order, dwelling closely on unfocused interaction in which people maintain a side-of-the-eye, half-an-ear awareness of the people, objects, and events in the space around them. After introducing key concepts from Goffman, the paper discusses three scenes of surveillance: a woman walking down a city street, two men putting up street stickers (a civil offence), and passengers being scanned at an airport (Pütz 2012). It shows how different senses of potential threat and illegality enter the experience of surveillance, and it builds a rudimentary model. This paper considers only a tiny fraction of contemporary surveillance, but it shows Goffman’s value as an analytic resource that can hold large-scale generalisations about the surveillance society to account, allowing us to see agentive responses to surveillance that are too subtle to be captured by notions like subversion and resistance. Indeed, Goffman corroborates Green and Zurawski’s (2015) suggestion that surveillance is a basic mode of the social, elaborated in different ways in different environments.