KAMLOOPS – TRU Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices Norm Friesen will present a workshop discussion in a controversial subject next week when he travels to Burnaby to participate in the “(Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies,” a one-day workshop featuring cutting-edge research related to Applied Communication & Technology (ACT) to be held at the Segal School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Feb. 23.
Friesen will present as part of the 11:15 am panel, “Whose Internet? Agency and activism in cyberspace,” speaking on “Networked Surveillance and User Agency: A Phenomenological Approach.”
“Networked surveillance refers to video cameras and other devices like motion detectors that are connected up through the Internet or some other big network to allow for easy remote monitoring,” explained Friesen.
“Especially relevant would be everyday examples like nannycams, which are webcams used to monitor what the babysitter is doing, or surveillance at ATM machines which also involve ‘dataveillance,’ which is surveillance through records of transactions and other kinds of computer data,” he added.
Friesen will discuss these forms of surveillance in relation to ‘user agency,’ which refers to what people who are under surveillance, or caught in legal and other relations through surveillance can or can’t do about it.
“We can, for example, disrupt the behaviour patterns that people fall into in situations of surveillance,” said Friesen. “For instance, one website encourages cinema-goers to snap a photo of the warnings that appear at the beginning of movies. These warnings generally forbid any photographic reproduction of what is shown in the cinema, and the flash going off in the theatre at this moment of ‘public browbeating’ is a symbolic protest that can at least provoke laughter, and hopefully dispel a feeling of complete and utter impotence.”
To discuss this new and sometimes unsettling ‘watchdog’ reality, Friesen uses a phenomenological approach, which is the philosophy and study of lived experience, particularly related to how people experience everyday things in terms of their bodies, experience of time and space, and how they experience “others” in their relations.
“It doesn’t so much see these things as personal or subjective, but emphasizes that we share experiences of these things through our common involvement in a shared world of experience, called the ‘lifeworld,'” he explained.
Other presentations include “Hacking for Social Justice: Tech Activists, Wikis and IMC,” “Online Education: The Human Factor” and “Internet at Play: Music and Games Online.”
Friesen’s findings and other event presentations are based on contributions to the upcoming Applied Communication Technology (ACT) Lab book, currently being co-edited by Dr. Friesen and Dr. Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology (SFU), and expected to be released in 2008.
Admission to the workshop, co-sponsored by SFU’s School of Communication and the Institute for the Humanities, is free, but reservations are required. Potential participants may call 604-268-7845 to reserve seats.
Through collaboration with BCcampus, workshop organizers will also video-podcast the workshop at a later date.
For more information, please contact Dr. Norm Friesen at 250-377-6256 or by email, or go to:
http://learningspaces.org/n/
