Lateral Surveillance in Singapore
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Abstract
With the high Internet penetration rate, and the dense saturation of audio-visual-capturing mobile smartphones among its citizens, Singapore provides a ripe technological infrastructure for a surveillance society. Its citizens have been serendipitously capturing, on photo or video, socially undesirable and controversial incidents of daily living. Widespread adoption and use of social media have enhanced the viewership of these behaviours captured, and provided a platform for responses of criticisms.
Panopticism, in the modern day context, is used as a metaphor to describe the effect of surveillance by authorities that shapes and manipulates social behaviour. Lateral surveillance is an opposite of panopticism, which portrays the impact of surveillance of the few, by the unseen many. This study explored the perception and impact of these activities on citizens’ social behaviours. Respondents were questioned on their awareness of surveillance in different milieu of their daily lives, such as commuting, driving, interactions in public spaces, and checking into, or uploading of photos onto social media, and its impacts on their social behaviours in those public spaces.
This study recruited a sample of 223 university students, aged between 19 and 24 years, comprising of both genders, to undergo an online survey. These students were directed to an online survey, which did not capture identifiable information, by the authors who have access to the students at their university.
Data collected provided descriptive statistics of the awareness and impact of panopticism, and lateral surveillance, by media-rich and media-savvy young citizens. Comparisons were made between panopticism versus lateral surveillance’s effect on social behavior. This study found that lateral surveillance had a more powerful effect on social behaviours, contributed significantly by the presence and usage of publicity channels such as FaceBook, and other local popular news websites.
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