Dear list, THE VIRTUAL WATCHERS [http://www.virtualwatchers.de/] is a project developed by artist Joana Moll and anthropologist Marius Pé that questions the dynamics of crowdsoucing the national security and border control. The piece looks into a Facebook group that gathered volunteering citizens that executed surveillance on the US-Mexico border from the Internet using a publicly funded online platform. The declared aim of this operation was to bring American citizens to participate in reducing border crime and block the entrance of illegal immigration to the US. The platform allowed the users to watch the border and make anonymous reports to the authorities if noticing illegal activity.
The project offers an interactive window that allows the public to dive into the conversations, jokes, and questionings of the Facebook group that gathered some of the volunteering citizens that actively used this platform. By doing so, it aims at highlighting to what extent the emotional investment and exchanges of these people work as an essential mechanism in the construction and legitimization of a post-panoptic system. Link to the project: http://www.virtualwatchers.de/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
