BigMother is your source for information, analysis and perspectives on technologies and social tendencies related to surveillance.
Present technological and sociological developments are taking us to new grounds in matters of surveillance, public control and power. Former societal structures and dynamics facilitated a very hierarchical and top down defined power relation. Combined with the emergence of automated monitoring and registering technologies, the power of the elite to control and suppress citizens by means of information control was captured in the timely metaphor of George Orwells Big Brother. However, while journalists, politicians, opinionators and people absorbed the normative meme of Big Brother and continued to deploy the term to stigmatize every new surveillance technology, things have slowly changed underneath their range of view. New technologies and social trends seem to turn the power of surveilling upside down. In fact, most ’surveillance’ technologies has come to serve broad segments of users instead of the few. Today, a majority of the tracked, monitored, and registered are actually the very ones benefitting from surveillance. When surveillance is turned into the service of the users by facilitating, augmenting, and improving social activities it becomes careware. The tenet of Big Mother is this ongoing ‘empathetic’ and social turn of surveillance technologies by discussing and analysing of the beneficial deployments surveillance technologies. When Big Brother becomes Big Mother.
The idea of BigMother grew from designing a full scale wireless systems by the name The DELCA Ghost Project initiated in 2003 at the IT University of Copenhagen. Unfolding our conceptual universe we realized how ’social’ our design parameters actually were. Confronted with the default worries about ’surveillance’ naturally involved when enabling technology to track the whereabouts of users to provide contextual services, we simply chose to promote the advantages of surveillance instead of retreating to defensiveness.
Enjoy Mikkel Holm Sørensen