Research Korner

Impact of Globalization

Table of Contents   Cover Page                                                                                                   i   Title                                                                                                                 2   Introduction                                                                                                   2   Main Body                                                                                                     2             Globalization and International Marketing                                  2             Major Factors that Influence Globalization                                 8             Impacts of Globalization                                                                 9   Conclusion                                                                                                   11                   Impact of Globalization               Nowadays, the concept of globalization has become one of the most important concepts that affect the operations of many organizations and companies worldwide. The changes happening in the society, including changes in terms of communication and technology have led to the modification of business and marketing processes and strategies, with the aim of coping with the mentioned changes. Due to the existing fact that along with the changes that happen in the society is the event of observing global markets becoming more homogenous. With this, companies and business organizations, especially multinational companies, continuously develop and improve their marketing programs and projects to meet the standards of consumers and serve them across national boundaries. The development and improvement of such marketing programs, strategies and projects lead many researchers and analysts to evaluate and assess the effects or impacts of globalization. With this in mind, this paper seeks to discuss the perceived impacts of globalization on the international marketing strategies of organizations, with reference to a major multinational company. In addition to this is the discussion of the major forces that have led to growing globalization of markets.   Globalization and International Marketing             The concepts of globalization and international marketing are two important concepts that must be addressed and discussed in relation to business operations of large multinational companies. Globalization is defined as the integration of the economy at a global level and involves two main features ( 2003). The first main feature states that in globalization, most trade takes place among multinational corporations, while the second main feature emphasizes that the major activity in the global economy is the flow of money in the form of derivatives, foreign investments and many others (2003). In simple terms, the concept of globalization simply means the opening and cross relating of different economies in the world, in line with the desire to have a wider and diverse market. With this, since the aim of globalization is to expand and diversify its market, the concept of international market then becomes relevant. International marketing refers to marketing across national borders, in which, the environment from where products and services are offered differs from country to country, and services and facilities are priced differently, with some products or services not available at all in some countries (2002). From this definition, it can be observed that the concepts of globalization and international marketing are similar, with the aim of market expansion and diversification. However, the difference lies on the fact that globalization may become the effect of international marketing.                  A lot of business organizations and companies engage in and focus on international marketing, with the desire for more profits, sales and recognition from consumers. International marketing also allows business organizations opportunities for further development and improvement, in terms of their products, services, strategies, systems, and operations. This is because international markets offer vast business opportunities for firms with a product or service in high demand, in line with newness, cultural adaptation, attractiveness, and appropriate marketing strategies that can assist them particularly ( 2007). In addition, when firms focus on international marketing, they are given the chance to gain more knowledge and information in their industry, thus, having the opportunity to provide more innovative services and products to their consumers.             With this, the strategies used in international marketing can be discussed. The strategies or methods used in international marketing are being used by multinational companies, with their aim of expanding and diversifying their markets. Primarily, exporting is the initial strategy of firms in entering a foreign market. Exporting means manufacturing a product in one country and selling it to another, and involves marketing products that have been made or assembled in a target country (2002). This is the initial step of international businesses because exporting is a low risk strategy, wherein few investments are made (2007). Second strategy is through an establishment of an enduring presence in the foreign country through contract manufacturing, which involves having someone else manufacture products, while a specific firm take on some of the marketing efforts, thus, saving investment (2007). Third strategy is through licensing and franchising the products of local businesses (2002), which are low exposure methods of entry, as they allow other individuals or groups of individuals to use the firm’s trademarks and accumulated expertise, thus, generating little control over the operation of the business (2007). In addition, firms can also establish their name and reputation in a foreign market through sourcing components from foreign states (2002), or importing raw materials and other equipments. This would somehow assist the company in establishing its reputation and name in the foreign country, thus, giving it enough opportunity to be known by its target market. Last strategy or method of market entry is through direct entry strategies, where the firm either acquires a firm or builds operations that involve the highest exposure (2007). With direct entry strategies, the firm can gather more knowledge regarding the local market of its target country, and sustains greater control over its resources and information (2007).               These strategies are used by business organizations and firms to ensure their establishment in the market of their target country. With the use of such methods of strategies, business organizations and firms are able to focus on their aims and goals, thus, making them more focused in taking advantage of open opportunities that they can consider as their edge over other companies from the same industry. In addition, with these strategies and methods, multinational companies or firms would be able to obtain adequate and relevant information and knowledge regarding their target market and country, thus, would be useful in line with their product or service development and improvement. The use of such strategies, thus, enabling them to participate in the process of and in enhancing globalization.             In relation to the strategies and methods used by firms to engage in international marketing are the global strategies that also aim for the same goals that international marketing have. Most companies perceive globalization as a matter of taking a superior business model and extending it geographically, with necessary modifications, to maximize the company’s economies of sale. From this perspective, the key strategic challenge is to simply determine how much to adapt the business model – how much to standardize from country to country versus how much  to localize to respond to local differences. However, the balance of localization and standardization does not disregard the fact that not all companies are similar from one another, including their differences in potential for development. Differences from country to country, in contrast, are viewed as obstacles that need to be overcome (2003). The presence of differences is being recognized by companies as not only as a disadvantage, but also as an opportunity for business and sales. This is exhibited by the large multinational company Coca Cola. The Coca Cola Company is the world’s leading manufacturer, distributor and marketer of non-alcoholic beverages, concentrates, and syrups, and is present in almost all parts of the world ( 2005). It is considered a global company, one that largely participates in the process of globalization, for it is able to recognize and respect the cultural differences among countries and continents. Coca Cola was able to learn and educate itself to be able to continue serving, satisfying, and meeting the demand of its customers, through product innovation and development ( 2005). With this, the company was able to participate immensely in the process of globalization, for the establishment of their name and reputation in the global market does not only mean the increase in the sales and profit of the company, but also the promotion and encouragement of education and learning, through the Coca Cola Foundation. The Coca Cola Foundation was formed and now operates in nearly 200 countries, with the primary goal of helping those in need, especially those who lack education and knowledge from academic institutions ( 2005). From this, it can be seen and proved that the Coca Cola Company has been able to become successful with its endeavors, and thus, contributory to the process of globalization. Moreover, in contrary to the global strategy of Coca Cola is the perception that going global does not mean that the company must necessarily have a presence around the world, like Coca Cola. This simply means that the company must perceive global competition and global markets and has determined the best strategy to prosper in that environment. The word “global” means the entire world, but is made up of smaller, more individual geographic entities, beginning with the market in a particular state or province and extending beyond, thus, does not limit only to the participation of large manufacturers (2002). There are several furniture manufacturers who have carved a niche in the European market. One Northeastern company with 70 employees exports to England and currently dedicates about 20% of its production to its market. Again, it is important to understand that a global strategy does not have to encompass every continent but can be regional, and giving large importance to plan, above all else (2002).     Major Factors that Influence Globalization             The primary drive of companies and firms to globalize is their intention or desire to expand and widen their target markets. The expansion and widening of the target markets of international firms indicates that the firm has enough resources to sustain and maintain its operations and production. Expansion of the company also indicates that the company has acquired enough knowledge in maintaining the operation of the company, thus, more learned and experienced in its own industry. This is a major factor to recognize, for with the desire to expand, the company aims for more profit and sales, which would enable to company to become more established in its industry. Second major factor to recognize and emphasize is the role of diversification, which is related to the presence of different cultures and races in the company. Several positive effects are attributed to diversification, and includes efficient resource allocation through internal capital markets, the increase in the ability of firms to internalize market failures, and increase in productivity (2006). In addition, diversification can also increase the generation of ideas, for more individuals become involved in the processes of the firm. Employees are also exposed to more cultures, practices and knowledge, thus, developing its organizational culture. Third major influence is the open opportunities for firms to engage in new business ventures, which would provide them with chances for more profit and prestige. New business ventures involve the production of new products or the innovation of a specific product or service. Fourth major influence or drive is the fact that firms may achieve fame or prestige if it globalize. The establishment of name, product/service, and reputation in specific countries and continents gives the business organization a chance to be regarded as one of the most successful business organizations in the whole world, thus, becoming more established in its own industry. Last major influence is the possibility of attracting new and more talents and skills in the company, which would give the organization the edge of performing well over other companies.   Impacts of Globalization             One of the perceived impacts or effects of globalization are the establishment of international alliances or coalitions, which link firms of the same industry based in different countries ( 2003). With international alliances, international policies and agreements will be established and reinforced, thus, effecting an increase in the establishment of harmonious relationships among companies. In addition, international alliances strengthens the industry where specific companies belong to, thus, reinforcing their bond that would enable them to come up with strategies for further improvement and development. Second impact of globalization is the development and improvement of the whole organization in order to address challenges or problems, for in line with the participation in globalization is the increase in the number of problems to be encountered. The need to configure and coordinate globally in complex ways creates some obvious organizational challenges, such as organizational structure, reporting hierarchies, communication linkages, and reward mechanisms ( 2003). With this, it can be understood that along globalization is the need to develop, improve, innovate, and adopt new strategies and methods in relation to systems modification to enable adjustment to the changes and challenges being encountered by the organization. Modification and restructuring in the organization is needed because along with the company’s intention to expand and widen its target market is the need for additional workforce and management processes and styles that would enable the company accommodate the increase in changes. Restructuring and remodeling of the company, thus, serves to be a good way of adjustment.             Third impact of globalization is the establishment of government relations. In the globalized era, the selection of foreign market to enter and the mode of entry will largely depend on the negotiations with the foreign governments concerned ( 2003). This is because the international business must be able to make negotiations and agreements with the government concerned, in order to comply with necessary requirements and encourage harmonious relationships. In addition, the ‘muscle power’ of the global firm can be vital in deciding the shift of power equilibrium, such that it must manage its relationship with the foreign government to its advantage ( 2003). Establishing a good and manageable relationship with the government concerned ensures a lasting relationship with the firm, thus, extending its operations in the foreign country. Last major impact of globalization is the increase in competition among other firms in the same industry. A global firm may be in a better position to compete with its global rival, as it can enhance its resources globally ( 2003). Being able to participate in its foreign target market makes the global firm more advanced and more developed compared to its rivals in the same industry, for it is able to meet the standards and demands of its foreign customers. From this perception, major suppliers and stakeholders would prefer the global firm to other firms.   Conclusion             From this discussion, it can be perceived that the concepts of globalization and international marketing affect one another, in terms of the operations of global business firms. Coming up with international marketing strategies enables a global firm to participate in the process of globalization, which enhances its abilities in addressing all the problems and challenges that come its way. In addition, the development of international marketing strategies enables a global firm gather relevant and additional knowledge regarding its target market. The use of such knowledge would come in handy in the actual process of developing a product or service and in its operations. Several factors determine the drive of organizations to participate in the process of globalization, and include expansion, diversification, new open opportunities, fame or prestige, and attracting new talents and skills in the organization. The interaction of such factors enables a global firm to devise useful and innovative ways on entering a foreign market. These methods produce a number of impacts, including international alliances, organizational challenges, government relations, and competition. These impacts enable global firms address issues in their organization, which further develop and improve their management and system.

Impact of Globalization

Table of Contents Cover Page i ...

Deliver Oral Presentation

Deliver Oral Presentation

Would you rather: a) deliver an oral presentation to an outside audience b) be interviewed for a news story , or c) make a presentatio...

Nursing Shortage and Management Research Proposal Paper

Topic Nursing Shortage and Management   Research Question How could the healthcare industry address the nursing shortage and what is the importance of continuing professional development in the medical care system?   Purpose Statement The purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the underlying reasons behind the shortage in nurses and the subsequent implications for the profession in the future. It is also noteworthy to mention that undertaking this study is central to determine the future of the healthcare industry through analysis of different patterns and trends in order to present critical evaluation on how the industry could counteract the nursing shortage. The prevalence of shortage called for an effective nursing management as supplementary to combating the said shortage. This study intends to investigate the role of academia and healthcare institutions in effort to discover how they address the shortage and how they manage their nurses. Fifty health care professionals from different medical institutions will be surveyed. Questions will include explorations on how these institutions are recruiting nurses, what are their motivating schemas, what are the factors they perceived to be contributing to the shortage and how supply of nurses compensates with the demand.            Problem Statement There had been a report in October 2004 that approximately 72% of healthcare supervisors had experienced nursing shortage at their facilities. A separate report estimated that in the year 2000, approximately 30 states experienced a nursing shortage and that by the year 2020, 44 of the states would likely to experience further shortage along with the District of Columbia. There are also statistics that showed a significant reduction in the number of nursing school graduates (nursingshortageinfo.com). The problem lies on the serious implications the nursing shortage pose for the future. Nursing shortage is deemed to be a threat to care continuum. The worsening of the situation can be also viewed based on the facts that the nursing schools enrollment are declining, that many registered nurses are graduating at an average age of 31 and that half of the workforce is expected to retire in the next 15 years. Based on these facts, the predictability in lack of medical workforce is central to nursing education, retention, attraction and management.        Significance of the Problem There are many qualified applicants, however, space and finances hinder them to continue. Though it can be said that there is significance in the number of enrollees, still, there are limiting factors inherent in nursing programs. Nursing students are obstructed to pursue their studies mainly because of the lack of funding. These are evident in unaffordability of clinical facilities and laboratories and to compensate with the cost, nursing students are the ones who are shouldering the expenses. The number of nurses who leave their profession mainly due to retirement and job burn out are not complementary to the number of those who are entering nursing schools. Others chose to pursue professional practice outside the confines of hospitals. They prefer to work on much inviting environment like family clinics, care units and home. Creative staffing is not doing what is expected from it. Albeit the benefits, remuneration and reward, the shortage itself is compelling registered nurses whom are still practicing their profession to retire because of stress and anxiety the work brings.       Focused Summary ‘States Tackle Nursing Shortage’ (Goodwin, 2002)             The article discusses the core of the nursing shortage in the US, how the working conditions could be improved and the breadth of the prevalence of the condition in different states and internationally. Different standpoints are demonstrated as it consists of statements from registered nurses and the CEO of the American Organization of Nurse Executives. A survey made by the American Nurses Association revealed that 75% believed that the quality of their profession had declined and that 56% stated that their time for patients had decreased. As revealed, nurses were offered many different incentives that range from scholarships, loan programs, signing bonuses and increased salaries to further attract and retain registered nurses in the workplace. The article directly deals with the subject as it covers both nursing shortage and how different states are implementing various measures to fill positions.   ‘Critical Long Hours’ (Price, 2002)             The article gave informations on the reasons why many registered nurses are leaving the hospitals – health, age and workload. Hospitals are directly competing for nurses to address the inadequacy at their respective facilities. However, there are many rivals that these hospitals must face and these can all be seen inside the facilities. The extent of the shortage is more than combating the shortage itself but mainly stress that is brought by long hours of work and doing the works that is usually done by two to three people. This article is of particular importance since it provides insights on how nursing must be appropriately managed and it presents factors that must be at the core of every nursing management programs.   ‘The shortage of registered nurses in monopsony’ (Chung-Cheng, 2002)             The article makes use of two models – the Solow efficiency wage monopsony model and the job-hour model – in estimating the nursing supply and demand. The author states that one of the main reasons of nursing shortage in a small town is always monopsonic. The argument of Chung-Cheng is critical on hiring nurses based on the equilibrium wage he or she offered. This article is fundamental given that managing nurses incepts from sourcing them up to their retirement.   Literature Review ‘States Tackle Nursing Shortage’ (Goodwin, 2002)             Goodwin directly reflects on the consequences of the nursing shortage today until 15 to 30 years from now whereby the maturing age would double and thus the need for medical care and nursing is expected to be doubled too. She made mention of the need for hospital restructuring in general, for the commitment of the young people and for general respect for the profession. Pam Thompson said that there is a need for a system-wide focus and how the provider should change the way they deliver care. To address the problem, states enacted different legislative plans including forgiving loans, boosting the state schools capacity to admit and train nurses, collecting data in state aid and regional workforce planning. To improve the work conditions, many nurses stated that they are dissatisfied with their jobs. Senator Bob Hagedorn of Colorado saw working conditions and forced overtime as the main reason for the decline. There are six states that limit or prohibit mandatory overtime. For example, Maryland legislature prohibits hospitals in requiring nurses to work on overtime.             California has seen to be one of the most gaps between supply and demand of nursing professionals. The Workforce Investment Act purports funding standardization efforts and career ladder program for certified nurse assistants. California led the setting of minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in 1999. The legislation had established minimum staffing levels intended for registered nurses and licensed vocational nurses. Another alternative is directed on requiring hospitals and other medical institutions to develop their staffing plan ensure patient care continuum.   ‘Critical Long Hours’ (Price, 2002)             The key factors identified by Price are relative to the aging nursing population and the professional burn out. There are nurses that reached retirement and there are not enough people to replace them.  Since enrollments are down, some schools chose to close. The responsibility for nurse recruitment is fundamental on supporting the work life balance. Provided that hospitals had forced their nurses to work on overtime without prior notifications, they honed an uncomfortable environment implicitly. The shortage is also linked with unrealistic nurse workloads and thus they are forced to leave their careers.  Predictions are made that by 2020 half-million staff nurses would in inadequacy. The aging population aggravates the problem. The age and the shortage are at the extreme.       ‘The shortage of registered nurses in monopsony’ (Chung-Cheng, 2002)             Monopsonists are likely to report vacancies. Provided that there is a significant level of monopsony power in nursing markets wherein one or few hospitals employ in the majority of registered nurses. Based on the two models, it is found that a monopsonist may not report vacancies as the labor market equilibrium in monopsony could likely to result in a state or excess labor supply. The reason for the nursing shortage is not only that monopsonist has the power over wages and the relative strengths of labor between supply and demand.        References   Chung-Cheng, L. (2002). The Shortage of Registered Nurses in Monopsony: A New View from Efficiency Wage and Job-Hour Models. The American Economist, 46(1), 29+.   Goodwin, K. (2002, October-November). States Tackle the Nursing Shortage: The Lack of Qualified Nurses Is Reaching Epidemic Proportions. States, Universities and Hospitals All Are Trying to Do Something about It. State Legislatures, 28(9), 20+.   Nursing Shortage. Retrieved on 8 February 2008 from http://www.nursingshortageinfo.com/index.shtml.   Price, J. H. (2002, March 15). Long Hours, Burnout contribute to Nursing Shortage in Hospitals. The Washington Times, A01.

Nursing Shortage and Management Research Proposal Paper

Topic Nursing Shortage and Management Research Question How could the healthcare industry address the nursing shortage and wha...

The Culture of Surveillance

The Culture of Surveillance Postmodern cultural theory after Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard has tended to indict surveillance as a disciplinary apparatus, producing a society that is both “carceral” and increasingly virtual. At the same time, social critics like Lasch have decried the growth of narcissism amid the failure of liberalism. This essay aims to complicate both of these perspectives by examining the contradictory desire for surveillance in popular media like “reality TV” and in the social sciences themselves. It may be that the desire to watch and be watched is a more deeply rooted element of the liberal democratic impulse than we normally care to admit. KEY WORDS: surveillance; reality-based television; narcissism; social psychology; liberal democracy. At least since Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, the way in which surveillance functions as a mechanism of social regulation and discipline has been central to the study of cultural representations (1975). Foucault’s resurrection of Bentham’s panopticon was in large part also a reelaboration of Max Weber’s “iron cage” thesis about bureaucratic, capitalist society, this time for an increasingly media-saturated age (1958, p. 181). To be sure, the power of surveillance was presented by Foucault as both coercive and productive where social relations were concerned—he famously claimed to refuse any normative approach to the topic—but it would be fair to say that it was surveillance as morally and even epistemologically regulative authority that became the dominant issue for the majority of Foucault’s readers, who applied it equally to the unseen enforcement of good social order in the nineteenth-century novel ( [1988]) and the unacknowledged workings of political and economic control in the modern metropolis (  [1990]). In these and countless other examples, surveillance emerged as an instrument by which authoritative social institutions shaped reality, either for the benefit of such institutions and the classes they served or for some more general tyrannous purpose. Foucault’s thesis resonated in profound ways with a Western intelligentsia that had been reminded constantly of the evils of surveillance in communist Eastern Europe, especially through novels like  1984; that watched both the Zapruder home movie of John Kennedy’s assassination and the live broadcast of Lee Harvey Oswald’s subsequent murder; that had been educated in the ways of the media by films like Medium Cool and Blow Up; and that had witnessed full-scale televised war in Vietnam from their living rooms. At the same time, with commentators like  (1967), Jean  (1972, 1973), and (1984), the truth of contemporary (or postmodern) culture began to take shape in the idea that reality itself was already a theatrical spectacle or hyper-real simulation—a thesis that would have seemed utterly inane were it not for the power of film and television technologies to make fictional worlds appear indistinguishable from real ones. In one of his famous dicta,  (1983) insisted that Disneyland functioned not as a fantasy escape from the harsh reality of Los Angeles, but rather as a ruse to make us think that Los Angeles and the rest of an equally fantastic America were in fact real.2 Such a wonderfully Parisian bon mot depended on the perception that Los Angeles is reducible to Hollywood, and that Hollywood itself is further reducible to studio lots (even if not all in Hollywood) filled with false building fa¸cades arranged in imitation neighborhoods. The trompe-l’æil of the studio lot was indeed the material basis ofWalt Disney’s quite profitable good idea, one that has been further elaborated by projects like Universal City Walk—for many visitors, a virtual urban scene preferable to the real thing just outside. Baudrillard saw correctly that the preference for Disney’s simulated village square was related to similar simulations across America (and the rest of the world), from theme parks to nostalgic urban renewal projects—but he continued to link this “hyperreality” to the “carceral” nature of modern society, thus repeating Foucault’s basic premise. Even so, neither Foucault nor Baudrillard explicitly clarified the link between surveillance and simulated reality, and it is in part the implicit connection between them that I will be talking about. While some contemporary popular entertainment would seem to be following in Foucault’s footsteps—the recent film The Truman Show is, precisely, about the tyranny of surveillance as a manipulative, god-like control of individual and society alike, all set in what could be called a carceral “small town” version of 2“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland ( just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (). The Culture of Surveillance 347 Universal City Walk—recent trends like “reality TV” have made it obvious that a very different, far more embracing, attitude toward surveillance has been evolving at the same time, especially in fin-de-si`ecle society. Some of the shift in attitude about surveillance is due simply to a shift in the primary object and purpose of surveillance. Most Americans, for example, saw a surveillance-obsessed East Germany where every sixth person was a political informant for the secret police, or Stasi, as a frightening threat to liberty and privacy, one worth the risk of a nuclear arms race. But Americans today react very differently when the television program America’s Most Wanted, increasingly celebrated as a tool of law enforcement, mobilizes its viewing public as bounty hunters’ apprentices. (A “real-life” police program like Cops is a related phenomenon: though not interactive, Cops in its own way also functions as a law-enforcement tool, making viewers virtually complicit with the police actions filmed.) In the same vein, high school students, after the Columbine shootings (and others similar to it), now seem far more willing than formerly to agree that “snitching” to authorities about the privately voiced violent fantasies of their friends is the right thing to do. Perhaps most striking of all, in becoming a common household appliance, the small video camera transformed surveillance into a practice in which average citizens could control, rather than be controlled by, a recording gaze. A bystander’s videotaping of the police beating of  in Los Angeles transformed the nature of surveillance, turning back the eye of authority upon itself. Some police forces have responded to the proliferation of video cameras by policing their officers with self-surveillance video recordings that might also provide evidence against subsequent charges of police brutality. In what could be taken as a kind of practical, if perhaps terribly ironic, refutation of Foucault’s work on the modern prison as disciplinary panopticon, San Francisco’s newest prison facility has won rave reviews from its inmates (to the extent that such a thing is measurable), precisely because the prison’s explicitly panoptical architecture undermines the culture of rape that has plagued other facilities for years. In this prison, as in America’s Most Wanted, the suburban high school, the airport, the stadium, the government building, the queue at the ATM machine, the local convenience store, and especially cases like that of  video surveillance is now often embraced as an undeniable good. One might also mention the more passively accepted (if often unwanted) sort of electronic surveillance that goes on unnoticed as we browse the Internet, or purchase products on-line: The “cookies” that merchandisers attach to our electronic identities track our consumer preferences in ways that are almost as revealing as a hidden camera in our homes. Undoubtedly, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001 by terrorists in hijacked airliners will make surveillance, at least for the purposes of law enforcement, all the more acceptable. At Universal City, a voice on the public address system now repeatedly declares, “You are being watched,” and visitors report that they are comforted by the message. Still, I want to suggest that the new trend toward “reality TV,” by which I mean largely unscripted, though heavily edited, programs peopled by ensembles of nonprofessional actors and focussed on group dynamics, as exemplified by programs like Big Brother, Survivor, Boot Camp, and many others, seems to be tapping into something quite apart from America’s continuing fear of crime, terrorism, and senseless adolescent mayhem, and distinct from the ever deeper penetration of market research into our lives. A development that began almost a decade ago with MTV’s Real World (1992) and has evolved considerably since then in Europe, the United States, and, most recently, Russia, “reality TV” elaborates surveillance as a sublime object of desire, and it is the nature of that desire that we should try to understand. When we add to this the growth of self-surveillance in cyberspace—the 24-hour video feed of one’s routine activities on a computer website that Big Brother incorporated into its format—the possibility arises that, for a growing number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less a regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as protection) than a populist path to self-affirmation and a ready-made source of insight into the current norms of group behavior (even, as I hope to show, for the academic social psychologists among us). In 2000 Apple introduced a computer that would allow you to edit and provide musical accompaniment to digital home movies. The Truman Show, that is, only got it half right:We are now the subjects of media-shaped, even virtual, realities, but we are also being encouraged to become the producers—and the ethnographers—of these virtual lives, to edit them on our iMACs even as we live them. Already, whole families document the trivialities of their existence on web pages designed to celebrate intimacy as a public performance. I am bombarded almost daily with news (and worse: vacation pictures!) from cousins a continent away, and I feel technologically slow because I do not (yet) display my personal life on a constantly updated website. While these forms of surveillance are surely less oppressive than the one that Orwell foretold, they embody to an astonishing degree the idea that modern culture has become dominated by the practice of testing reality. Advanced capitalist society at the dawn of the new millennium is less about truth versus fiction, or authenticity versus simulation. It is instead about a quest for real life that requires surveillance for its—for our—verification. The relatively recent rise of reality television is in many ways the culmination of developments in modern culture since 1945 (to which I will return at the end of this article), some dependent on new media technology and some quite independent of it, in which fiction and truth are blurred in new, but also not so new, ways. There are obviously much older precedents: from the seventeenth century on, the bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view elaborated by the European novel’s omniscient narrator turned a given segment of society into a believable reproduction through the fiction of anonymous surveillance. Nineteenth-century romancers like Nathaniel Hawthorne reveled in the role of unseen social observer, naturalists like  explicitly referred to their practice as a kind of sociological experiment in observation and recording, and Henry James finally codified the entire relationship of the novel to surveillance by embodying the recording consciousness of his narrative perspective in a nosy, spying character l).  notion that the nation-state could have arisen only in the context of a “print-capitalism” that provided the medium for a collective sense of simultaneity among distant strangers must be mentioned as well. For what Anderson implies in the coming of mass-consumed print is the point of viewof virtual, quasi-divine surveillance that any citizen could assume when imagining the “simultaneity” of the national community ([1983]1991). That point of viewis formethe perspective of “the social” itself, the nascent idea of “society” that would be elevated by early twentieth-century sociologists into an all-encompassing super-subject watching over all. “The collective consciousness,” wrote  “is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. As the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them” (1915). hypostatization of the social, remarkable in its own time, is a prescient forecast of a social mind far more materially embedded in today’s proliferation of collectively approved and encouraged surveillance and surveillance-oriented television. Early photography suggested at times the more totalizing surveillance to come: It was said that Atget photographed the streets of Paris, remarked, as if they were the scene of a crime (1969). The moving picture of cinema made it possible to reproduce human action, which for Aristotle had been the primary object of all poetic mimesis, with a previously unknown verisimilitude that even captured war in newsreel footage. And the hand-held camera eventually allowed cinema and television to achieve, or fabricate, a sometimes startling immediacy and intimacy. It is this new combination of surveillance and putative immediacy that marks the present moment in cultural representation, as we in Los Angeles routinely watch televised automobile police pursuits on our nightly newscasts, unfolding in real time and perhaps right outside our doors, led by individuals who know they are being observed constantly from hovering news helicopters but who choose to play out to its inevitable end a scenario that appears to have been scripted for them in advance. These automobile chases are primarily the effect of two decisions: First, the LAPD abandoned reckless pursuits that produced unacceptable amounts of “collateral damage” whenever police attempted to run down and apprehend the fleeing suspect as quickly as possible; and second, embarked in the wake of his ex-wife’s murder on whatwemight call a simulated “run for the border,” which became the most widely observed police pursuit of the era. This television genre—for that is what it has become, a genre—has since taken on a life of its own, complete with bizarre “color commentary” provided by local newscasters who during the chase say things like, “Ok, now that’s something new,” or “Well, we’ve never seen that before.” There are websites devoted to the genre. Here is what can be read at the home page of one such site: How do you find out when a chase is being broadcast live on TV? And how many have you missed because you didn’t know about it? Some people rely on their friends to tell them about a chase, but with PursuitAlertTM service, you’ll be alerted by pager, phone, or cell-phone of every live high speed chase broadcast in your region. When you get the page, you’ll know a chase can be seen on your TV as it happens. Sign up now for a FREE, no-obligation, 3 month trial. Nothing to cancel!3 These car chases are at heart reproductions of one of the oldest Hollywood film genres: The Keystone Cops helped lay the foundation for American cinema itself, and a long history of LAPD chiefs have unwittingly found themselves haunted by the bumbling Keystone legacy. If we could ever fully understand the meaning of the live, televised car chase, I am suggesting, we might also understand the complicated relationship between truth and fiction in contemporary culture. The underlying strategy at work in shows like Survivor and Big Brother (a title conjuring up ironically what had been depicted with such horror in 1984) can be summed up in a phrase used by  to describe the sort of autoethnography practiced by the avant-garde intellectuals ( ) of the short-lived Coll`ege de Sociologie in late 1930s Paris: to “make each of [the community’s] members participate so that : : : they would become the voyeurs of and actors in a sociological experiment” (1980, ). Like the Coll`ege, that is, contemporary reality-based television has awkwardly embraced an oft-repeated modern quest for the sacred and most primitive elements of human community, and (also like the Coll`ege) has done so in an elective, participatory, and highly self-reflexive, ironic way. It is no accident that the first American edition of Survivor (a European import) was set on a “desert island,” thus reproducing the signature element of countless Victorian “Robinsonades” aimed primarily at adolescent boys, and that the second edition, dividing its teams into “tribes,”was set in the Australian outback, which is precisely where much groundbreaking ethnology on aboriginal peoples was performed in the late nineteenth century.4 If such programs explore the foundations of community, they do so in the more commercial context of a game show, in which the winner is actually the person who manages to survive the group’s predestined self-dissolution. (MTV’s original reality television series, Real World, has no game-show format, though the series may have inadvertently spawned the device of ritual expulsion marking all later versions of the genre when its participants spontaneously banished by majority vote one particularly disruptive member.) In Survivor and Big Brother (also a success in the Netherlands and Germany before coming to American television) the “tribe” or “household” periodically votes to expel a member from the community, and the programs focus on the shame involved in being expelled—a crucial element that suggests the degree to which all reality television is a nostalgic exercise in the production of shame for individuals, whether participants or audience members, who no longer feel any in everyday life. The various group members must thus manipulate one another, with varying degrees of subtlety, to insure their own social survival for as long as possible. Participants do not simply vote to expel those who are not “fit,” or do not “fit in”; in many cases, a participant votes to rid the group of another individual who may fit in too well and thus become a threatening rival at the end. On the surface, as many commentators have pointed out, loyalty is reduced to a commodity, valuable only as long as it is useful for individual success. But a better analogy may be the inner reality of ordinary democratic politics. In summarizing the driving ambition of F. Clinton White, the manager largely responsible for Barry Goldwater’s Republican nomination for U.S. president in 1964, Russell Baker perfectly describes the central plot device of both Big Brother and Survivor: “He became fascinated,” Baker writes of White, “by the mechanics of acquiring power through democratic process.”5 It would be na¨ıve to think that the average person in Germany or America is any less fascinated by, or concerned about, the same thing, and reality TV is a suitably populist exploration of the theme. Underlying this eccentric exercise in democratic voting strategy is an exploration of forms of communal belonging and intimacy, complete with the exhilaration of solidarity won through hardship and ordeal, and the embarrassment attending expulsion. The act of expulsion holds commercial possibilities also for those sacrificed, who often conduct staged interviews immediately after the experience and wind up (quite without any residue of shame) on talk shows in the days and weeks following. The expelled thus provide the program an afterlife through in-house gossip about those who betrayed them, laying at the same time what they hope will be the groundwork for further television exposure. One contestant expelled from last season’s Survivor resurfaced on the soap opera series The Young and the Restless, playing—who else?—herself, implying nothing less than that she is, as a real person, already a recognizably fictionalized character. (This idea—that people in real life are increasingly coming to see themselves, and play themselves, as fictional characters—is of course an idea as old as Cervantes’s great seventeenthcentury novel, Don Quixote. But contemporary modes of surveillance provide a stage, and an audience, for such real-life fictions that is not merely quantitative in its difference.) In the newer Chains of Love television program, a surveillanceoriented version of the Dating Game—both part of a genre I would call “intimacy surveillance” that first appears in the earliest days of television—the “game” involves five people who have been chained together for several days, including a “picker” of one sex who periodically decides to release/renounce one of the four opposite-sex members of the chain gang until there is only one left to date. (So far, there have been no homosexual versions of reality-based television, though the winner of last season’s Survivor was indeed gay.) The structure of Chains of Love is thus an absurd, if suitably populist, fulfillment of Hegel’s famous account of master-slave relations in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where the enchained bondsman’s desire for recognition (in today’s world, for the main 19- to 34-yearold demographic, this means a date) requires a labor that becomes the mechanism and sign of accession to culture and self-consciousness—albeit of a rather limited sort, if the post-show interviews are to be believed (1977, p. 115). The communities formed within these television programs are in a sense cursed from the start: They must slowly dissolve through the continuous expulsion of one of their own, and the camera lingers time and again on the delicious mixture of sadness and guilty joy—Schadenfreude par excellence—on the faces of those who remain. The seemingly paradoxical community-destroying motif was made explicit in two additions to the genre: The Mole, in which a member of the group—not unlike a Stasi informant—is assigned the task of working “undercover” to thwart its collective efforts; and Temptation Island, in which single seducers are assigned the task of breaking up already troubled couples—a plot device that enables (for the first time, I think) legal, nonfiction prostitution in the guise of a television program, the seducers in effect being paid to provide sex to strangers. In these shows, both the victims of ritual expulsion and the sovereign saboteurs of the group function as what Bataille and his friends would have called “accursed shares,” which is to say they also appear as illustrations of the sacred forces embedded in the notion of the group (1967). The collective’s dissolution becomes the surest way of demonstrating the social magic that was holding it together in the first place. The trend within the reality-based genre may well be toward a more obvious game show structure, one that dispenses altogether with the surveillance and “reallife” settings of Survivor, Big Brother, and Temptation Island while retaining the tension between group solidarity and individual triumph, as well as the emphasis on the humiliation and rancor of those voted out of the group. A recent import from Britain, The Weakest Link, is really just a quiz show moderated by a British host with the aura of a dominatrix, humiliating those who answer incorrectly and dismissing those voted off with a highly ritualized “You are the weakest link: goodbye.” (In the English version, the humiliation appears to be more intensely felt, less easily laughed off, than on the subsequent American one.) But the immediate popularity of The Weakest Link—its curious appeal—is that it has distilled to a formulaic essence what other “reality-based” programs only achieve in more circuitous ways. Even where the surveillance-driven “reality-based” genre has The Culture of Surveillance 353 been completely taken over by the game show, the basic elements that, to my mind, structure all the new surveillance programming remain: 1) simulation of a sociological experiment; 2) display of the normative conditions of collective solidarity; 3) exploration of (and nostalgia for) the ritual of social ostracization; and 4) evaluation of the lengths to which individuals will go in manipulating group loyalty to achieve success (though even here the “survivor” who gets to claim the prize at show’s or season’s end may also be the unwitting beneficiary of even more aggressive rivals doing themselves in). It is impossible to ignore both the extent to which the “game show” may be the dominant genre determining the evolution of such programs and their “amateurhour” character, as they provide previously unknown participants with a chance at prime time television exposure. But it is also significant that their merging of reality and fiction obeys the same logic as that proposed by Jamin: we are being invited, as in so many other arenas of contemporary culture ( , to become participant-observers of our own lives. As Lord , the cynical aesthete of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, observes: “Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.”6 Simultaneously ethnologists and ethnological subjects, actors and audience in a culture that is increasingly like a self-conscious sociological experiment, we test ourselves to see what we will do, how we will perform, and what we will look like in the process. It is tempting in this context to invoke  influential Freudo- Marxian thesis in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations—a book whose pessimistic, end-of-liberalism premises, first outlined in essay form in 1976, laid the groundwork for ’s ill-fated announcement of American “malaise” amid a culture of reduced expectations (1991). —whose book was itself part of a wave of post-counterculture social theory in the 1970s, from , lamenting a putative increase in narcissism (p. 25)—re-tools an older Frankfurt School thesis about the inexorable decline of daddy and family behind the rise of the authoritarian personality, and concludes that “bureaucratic dependence” and “therapeutic justice” have become the basis of a new culture of narcissism (pp. 228–229). He approvingly cites Debord on capitalist advertising’s production of “pseudo-needs” (p. 72) and indicts the media’s reliance on “credibility” as opposed to “truth” (p. 74). Contrary to earlier theorists like , who emphasized Americans’ growing conformity and other-directed psychological orientation, Lasch insists that “Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative : : : they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of inter-personal relations for their own benefit” (p. 66). Lasch’s left critique can be readily applied to reality television, which is on the whole an orgy of capitalist self-promotion that tends to attract what might loosely be called “narcissistic” personalities. (A “Big Brother” sort of reality television program enjoying record ratings for theM6channel in France has in fact drawn sharp criticism from the left there, though along lines closer to those associated with Foucault or The Truman Show. The cultural difference from America is obvious. French communists, who have for decades now apparently concluded that bad taste, rather than private property, is the true enemy of the people, stormed the M6 studios waving copies of 1984 to “liberate” the show’s participants.7) From the vantage of the present moment, however, in the wake of the Cold War’s end, the apparent dominance of the marketplace, and the roaring economies of Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s administrations, it now seems clear that narcissism thrives just as well when nourished by the optimism of boundless growth and rhetorical tides that lift all boats as it does when stimulated by “stagflation” and astronomical interest rates. To be sure, single-parent households are still on the rise, and daddy gets less respect every day (though he is more likely to be heading a single-parent household himself than before); and there is now good evidence that divorce takes a greater toll on young children than anyone, at least outside the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, previously believed. But the multitude of familial arrangements seems to pose less of a direct threat today to the survival of liberal democracy than it did when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan raised the issue two decades ago, and no one now worries, `a la Dan Quayle, about Murphy Brown having a child out of wedlock on prime time television. Even Barney the dinosaur almost daily celebrates the diversity of family structures in children’s song. Liberalism would seem to have consolidated its social hegemony in the last decade, even if it is clear that it will take considerably more than a “village” to sustain its promise in truly egalitarian ways. Lasch’s conflation of the categories of individual psychology and social history may have been profoundly misleading, that is, despite his best efforts to clarify the relation between them. His high-toned, nominally left but also deeply conservative anxiety over the intellectual, political, and historical bankruptcy of American liberalism, which was the driving force behind his “culture of narcissism,” has for many been swept away along with the Soviet Union and the ColdWar. Lasch poignantly lamented liberal culture’s loss of, and disregard for, collective historical memory, but only ten years later  (1989) celebrated the end of history (a celebration oddly prefigured by academic ironists like Lyotard and Hayden White decades earlier) in the millennial triumph of a liberalism that Lasch thought was on its last legs. (reconsideration in 1990 of his arguments do little to revise their meaning [1991].) In the end, Fukuyama’s thesis may be even less convincing than Lasch’s, but it was a telling barometer of things to come: A doggedly centrist version of liberalism re-emerged in the 1990s that was successful enough to keep an otherwise quite impeachable president happily in power, both the doctrine and the man never more popular than when attacked by the radical right. Narcissism is intrinsic to the culture of surveillance shaping reality TV, even if there is no simple Laschian way of linking this narcissism to our collective life, our political ideals, or our historical memories, of tracing its etiology either to the decay of liberalism or to its triumph. In large part, the difficulty in contriving these links is due to the complex relationship between reality TV and social psychology itself, including the sort that Lasch practices. As one of the principal psychological evaluators and consultants for Big Brother noted in conversation with me recently, those who applied to be participants on the program exhibited an unusually high quotient of narcissistic, extroverted personality traits, at times to a manic degree.8 The psychologist’s task was to find individuals who also exhibited a reasonably strong tendency to join and be loyal to a team, though to improve ratings he occasionally advised producers to include a truly manic narcissist, who tended to be voted out of the group rather quickly. Contra Lasch, however, I would suggest that the audience’s appetite for the new surveillance-oriented television programs—which in many cases hire academic psychologists as advisors—would seem to be primarily the heightened emotional fulfillment of a desire elaborated for some time, paradoxically enough, by enlightened social theory. While the spread of surveillance is surely on one level a response to fear and the disorienting pace of social change, the pleasure that, both as voyeurs and as exhibitionists, we take in the proliferation of closely observed social reality is an almost inevitable consequence of the liberal democratic demand to make the socially hidden visible, to expose the secret workings of individual choice and group authority, and to create the increasingly transparent life-world that philosophers from Jean-Jacques  have held up as an ideal. This is precisely why, for example, American social psychologists in the years after the all-too-successful Nazi experiment in collective consciousness became so interested in testing and recording with cameras the way group authority works on the individual’s sense of identity and responsibility. Reality television is simply making exoteric (if also trivializing) the same sort of filmed inquiry into group dynamics that social psychologists have carried out esoterically for decades. Some contemporary psychologists may even be envious of television’s foray into the genre, since the ethical constraints on the use of human subjects at universities today would forbid the kind of experimental protocol brazenly deployed by programs like Temptation Island and Boot Camp. The consultant for Big Brother confirmed this: while his own ethics would not, he said, allow him to act as consultant for Temptation Island, he had already decided to use videotape footage from his work on Big Brother as a teaching tool in his classes at his university—even though the university itself would not have sanctioned the sort of experiment that Big Brother represented. We should recall here that Big Brother was accessible on the Internet, like a number of personal websites devoted to self-surveillance, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, and professional psychologists were on hand observing the interactions on the set at all times. Reality TV is, for me, the expression of a powerful, and increasingly unbridled, tendency within democratic society, one also embedded in its academic institutions, to reveal the norms and limits of individual responsibility and group identity, however exaggerated (and commercialized) the settings that reveal such knowledge may be. In effect, television is now doing the kind of social psychological research our universities no longer permit. The current wave of reality-based television programming can be traced back at least to the early-1970s film (and television series) An American Family, which inherited trends in earlier film documentaries and filmed academic social science, such as the famous experiment on individual responsibility and authority at Yale University in 1961 by Stanley Milgram. But it is obvious that what was a highly suspect and much criticized experiment three decades ago is now a phenomenon whose time has come. (The Louds of An American Family divorced on-air, and many wondered publicly whether the constant surveillance contributed to the family’s dissolution.) In the past, such public surveillance techniques had to be done for laughs if they were to obtain wide approval as entertainment. Alan Funt’s very successful Candid Camera was at heart a popularized version of an experiment in social psychology, in which the humor derived from confronting a na¨ıve participant with what might then have been called “cognitively dissonant” situations in (apparently) real life. But Funt’s short vignettes were very limited in scope and were completely devoted to a comic resolution. Likewise, the humiliations suffered by participants in the earlier TV game show Beat the Clock occurred solely within the context of slapstick comedy. The difference between Milgram’s experiment in the early 1960s, in which the tested subjects had to be na¨ıve in order for the results to be serious and meaningful, and An American Family a decade later, in which the participants were willing subjects of a televised documentary project intended to be equally serious and meaningful, perhaps represents a crucial shift in the American public’s acceptance of, and response to, such surveillance. There were so many applications for the second edition of Survivor, in many ways the catalyst for the new wave of reality-based television programs, that Federal Express suspended deliveries to the show’s producers. Big Brother too had an enormous applicant pool from which to choose. Not only did this trend expand in this year’s television season, but realitybased programming has itself become fodder for “ripped-from-the-headlines,” though still nominally fictional, police dramas like Law and Order, an episode of which indicted reality-based television for being—what else?—too real, paradoxically because it manipulates putative reality for the camera: the network vice president of the episode’s “fictional” reality-based program had manipulated a teenage actor, in a big-city version of the actual reality-based program Big Brother, to kill one of his loft-mates. A more recent program, Boot Camp, which is largely what its title implies, found itself caught in what may be the ultimate irony for a reality-based show: Its producers were sued by the producers of Survivor for copyright infringement, which would seem to imply that something like “reality” itself—or at least the networks’ understanding of that term—might soon be a legally copyright-able concept. Survivor has also been much discussed in newscasts and newspapers because some of the scenes televised during last year’s season were re-shot with extras or stunt persons standing in for the named players, a technique that oddly seems to violate more the viewing audience’s desire for the surveillance of unmediated “reality” than any overt claim made by the producers. The newreality programming can also be linked to an experiment by psychologist  at Stanford in the summer of 1971, in which students, divided into prisoners and warders, wound up displaying alarming degrees of cruelty to one another. More recent experiments in England have involved the division of a group sequestered in a country house into two rival moieties or teams that, faced with simple game show-like tasks, exhibited ferocious amounts of hatred toward their opposition, enforced a rigid loyalty to the group, and harshly branded any sympathy for the “enemy” as betrayal. Professor declared in 1997 that the ethical guidelines applied by today’s universities to research involving human subjects are too restrictive—in large part, of course, because of the sort of mess that  created three decades earlier at Stanford.9  may be watching a lot of reality TV these days. (I have a recurring nightmare that one day soon I will see a game show version of the Milgram experiment, complete with a celebrity edition in which na¨ıve, average Joe contestants are tested to see how far they will go in shocking , whose fake screams will emanate from an off-stage, but also televised, sound booth.)  quip about everyone in the future having fifteen minutes of fame—which was actually a slightly altered quotation of —has surely come significantly closer to realization since he uttered it, and the vehicle of that fame has been a narcissism-fueled culture of surveillance. Many of us want, desperately it seems, to be watched, and the rest are more than happy to play observers, even if we’re not so sure about the benefits of beingwatched ourselves. But when we watch, we do so for the same reasons that rivet our gaze to the visual records of and  “shocking” experiments. In advertising and justifying its surveillance-based mission, The National Inquirer articulates what must be the foundational tautology of the age: “Inquiring minds want to know.” We have been for some time both the subjects and the victims of that tautology, and I imagine that only an increase in secrecy and privilege, for which I see little demand from either enlightened theorists or common television viewers, would reverse the trend. And it is here that we may find the clearest link between Foucault’s panopticon and Baudrillard’s hyperreality. While it is a safe bet that our collective passion for social transparency and the egalitarian distribution of knowledge will never find true fulfillment in the proliferation of surveillance, the desire for surveillance has had a paradoxical side effect, inexorably transforming the world not into the stage immortalized by Shakespeare but into a real-time social-psychology experiment in which we are increasingly both test subjects and detached clinical observers. Should anyone feel disconcerted by this possibility, or undecided about its significance, I will note in closing that the whole phenomenon may be rather more short-lived than I have so far implied. The events of September 11 and the subsequent clamor for increasingly vigilant police surveillance has, at least for the moment, come to overshadow the appeal of cultural voyeurism. But the arrival in the summer of 2001 of Final Fantasy, a movie populated only with photo-realistic synthespians—computer-generated images indistinguishable (almost) from filmed actors—may already signal the beginning of the end to our current delight in surveillance.Within a decade, we might all be entertained primarily by computerized, super-real cartoons. Whether we are on the way to becoming cartoon characters ourselves is no longer a merely facetious question.

The Culture of Surveillance

The Culture of Surveillance Postmodern cultural theory after Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard has tended to indict surveillance as a ...