Blog

"What could possibly be harmful about striking a key at the computer? Nothing- unless you do it several thousand times a day."
-Deborah Quilter and Emil Pascarelli, Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer User's Guide, 1994, page 3.

"It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.


De Grazia, S. (1962). Of time, work, and leisure. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.

Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social text, 18(2), 33-58.

_{In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of "free labor," a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the connections between the "digital economy" and what the Italian autonomists have called the "social factory." The "social factory" describes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine." Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an "unreal," empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large...
The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture.}

Scholz, T. (Ed.). (2012). Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory. Routledge.

_{Digital Labor asks whether life on the internet is mostly work, or play. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment on blogs, we remix media, and we upload video to create much of the content that makes up the web. And large corporations profit on our online activity by tracking our interests, affiliations, and habits—and then collecting and selling the data. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? The international, interdisciplinary contributors to Digital Labor suggest that there is no longer a clear divide between ‘the personal’ and ‘work,’ as every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship—and all become fodder for speculative profit. They argue that we are living in a total labor society and the way in which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered is profoundly and disturbingly normalized by the dominant discourse of digital culture. Digital Labor poses a series of questions about our digital present: How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the hidden labor of the digital economy? How do we address that most online interaction, whether work or play, for profit or not, is taking place on corporate platforms? How can we acknowledge moments of exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment? In response to these questions, this collection offers new definitions of digital labor that address and challenge the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy.}

Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(2), 230-248.

<sub>Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labor developed in the essay is applied to the online economy and the example of interactive TV. The analysis suggests that a critical approach to forms of surveillance facilitated by interactive media must focus on asymmetries of power and control over information technologies and resources...

The productivity of surveillance, for the purposes of this article, can be understood as being always parasitic upon another form of labor...the critical literature on surveillance retain strong overtones of what Foucault describes as the insistence in the West on “seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than technical and positive” (1980, p. 121). This tendency is also reflected in the public debate over on-line privacy, which centers on the “invasion” of privacy and the oppressive surveillance capacity of the state. The emphasis is upon the ways in which disciplinary surveillance creates “docile bodies” and not upon the more suggestive aspect of Foucault’s analysis: the spiraling cycle of productivity incited by disciplinary regimes: the fact that docile bodies are not rendered inert, but stimulated. As Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish (1975/1977): “Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political' force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force” (p. 221). Docility and pacification are certainly among the goals of discipline, but the real power of surveillance is a relentlessly productive and stimulating one...</sub>

" For the psychology of Leipzig was, in the eighties and nineties, the newest thing under the sun. It was the psychology for bold young radicals who believed that the ways of the mind could be measured and treated experimentally-and who possibly thought of themselves, in their private reflections, as pioneers on the newest frontier of science, pushing its method into reaches of experience that it had never before invaded. At any rate they threw themselves into their tasks with industry and zest. They became trained introspectionists and, adding introspection to the resources of the physiological laboratories, they attempted the minute analysis of sensation and perception. They measured reaction times, following numerous and widespread ramifications. They investigated verbal reactions, thus extending their researches into the field of association. They measured the span and fluctuations of attention and noted some of its more complex features in the 'complication experiment,' a laboratory method patterned after the situation that gave rise to the astronomer's problem of the 'personal equation.' In their studies of feeling and emotion they recorded pulse-rates, breathing rates, and fluctuations in muscular strength, and in the same connection they developed methods of recording systematically and treating statistically the impressions observed by introspection. They also developed the psychophysical methods and in addition, made constant use of resources of the physiological laboratory. And, throughout all their endeavors, they were dominated by the conception of a psychology that should be scientific as opposed to speculative; always they attempted to rely on exact observation, experimentation, and measurement."
-Edna Heidbreder, Seven Psychologies, 1933, page 94-95.


_{Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out...The engagement pedometer project fits neatly with the Gates Foundation's emphasis on mining daily classroom interactions for data. One of the world's richest philanthropies, the foundation reflects Microsoft founder Bill Gates' interest in developing data collection and analysis techniques that can predict which teachers and teaching styles will be most effective.}

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of the experience) and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hoskin, K. W., & Macve, R. H. (1986). Accounting and the examination: a genealogy of disciplinary power. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 11(2), 105-136.

_{Historical elaboration of Foucault's concept of “power-knowledge” can explain both the late-medieval developments in accounting technology and why the near-universal adoption of a discourse of accountancy is delayed until the nineteenth century. It is the disciplinary techniques of elite medieval educational institutions—the new universities and their examinations—that generate new power-knowledge relations. These techniques embody forms of textual rewriting (including the new “alphanumeric” system) from which the accounting advances are produced and “control” is formalised. “Double-entry” is an aspect of these rewritings, linked also to the new writing and rewritings of money, especially the bill of exchange. By the eighteenth century accounting technologies are feeding back in a general way into educational practice (e.g. in the deployment of “book-keeping” on pupils) and this culminates in the introduction of the written examination and the mathematical mark. A new regime of “objective” evaluation of total populations, made up of individually “calculable” subjects, is thereby engendered and then extended — apparently first in the U.S. railroads — into modern comprehensive management and financial accounting systems (systems of “accountability” embodying Foucault's “reciprocal hierarchical observation” and “normalising judgement”), while written examinations become used to legitimate the newly autonomous profession of accountancy.}

Wow, continued:

Odilon Redon

H R Giger

Ernst Fuchs

Al Columbia

Patrick Woodroffe

Pushead

"There are still other times, however, when our sensory impressions are severly diminished, as for example when we enter virtually any contemporary institutional building, office complex or apartment high rise. Then we encounter the phenomenon known as sensory deprivation. In sensory deprivation, we are told, the victim experiences not lessened but increased imagery...The increased internal imagery is the result of the perceptual apparatus trying to keep going in spite of reduced or almost totally absent external stimulation...Everyone knows that, far from being sensorily deprived, the average city dweller is fairly overwhelmed by a shattering and inescapeable barrage of sense impressions....and we defend ourselves by screening out that which we cannot or do not wish to assimilate. But there is more to it than that. I believe that this urban sensory assault and battery, if we feel we must describe it as overload, is a simple quantitive overload, having no variety whatever. The tumult and the sensory hammering all come from one single source; without exception they are of human manufacture. All our sensory bruises are self inflicted...Monotony is a prime contributor to the symptoms of sensory deprivation."
-John A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, 1981, page 92.

"Domesticated animals such as chickens or cattle have greatly diminished sensory capabilities compared to their wild counterparts. In the domesticated animal, scent, hearing, vision and tactility are in varying degrees crippled. From the onset of its life the animal is poor at processing even the meager sensory information available in its simple, monotonous environment. Similarly, children today are growing up with less potential to develop sensory acuity because of the monotony of their environments. Watching television, playing with computers, and spending extended amounts of time indoors all contribute to a lack of sensorimotor stimulation. As with domesticated animals, children do not experience the full potential of their physical selves...Learning through direct physical experience cannot be reproduced on a computer screen."
-Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, The Child and the Machine: How computers put our children's education at risk, 2000, page 52.

"There has been a shift in American business culture-our children are now seen as an economic resource to be mined or exploited, like bauxite."
-Gary Ruskin, quoted in The Child and the Machine: How computers put our children's education at risk, Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, 2000, page 127.

Bienkowski, M., Feng, M., & Means, B. (2012). Enhancing teaching and  learning through educational data mining and learning analytics: An issue brief. US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, 1-57.

Ogor, E. N. (2007, September). Student academic performance monitoring and
evaluation using data mining techniques. In Electronics, Robotics and Automotive Mechanics Conference, 2007. CERMA 2007 (pp. 354-359). IEEE.

_{Assessment as a dynamic process produces data that reasonable conclusions are derived by stakeholders for decision making that expectedly impact on students' learning outcomes. The data mining methodology while extracting useful, valid patterns from higher education database environment contribute to proactively ensuring students maximize their academic output. This paper develops a methodology by the derivation of performance prediction indicators to deploying a simple student performance assessment and monitoring system within a teaching and learning environment by mainly focusing on performance monitoring of students' continuous assessment (tests) and examination scores in order to predict their final achievement status upon graduation. Based on various data mining techniques (DMT) and the application of machine learning processes, rules are derived that enable the classification of students in their predicted classes. The deployment of the prototyped solution, integrates measuring, 'recycling' and reporting procedures in the new system to optimize prediction accuracy.}

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“Education is still the key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, and to fostering peace...it can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers...Today, education is a global public good unconstrained by national boundaries...It is no surprise that economic interdependence brings new global challenges and educational demands.”
-Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Secretary, Speaking to UNESCO in late 2010.

Todd Oppenheimer, The Computer Delusion, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, Volume 280, No. 1, pages 45-62.

<sub>There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs -- music, art, physical education -- that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom" with credulous and costly enthusiasm...

The promoters of computers in schools again offer prodigious research showing improved academic achievement after using their technology. The research has again come under occasional attack, but this time quite a number of teachers seem to be backing classroom technology. In a poll taken early last year U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more "essential" than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare...

Five main arguments underlie the campaign to computerize our nation's schools.
-Computers improve both teaching practices and student achievement.
-Computer literacy should be taught as early as possible; otherwise students will be left behind.
-To make tomorrow's work force competitive in an increasingly high-tech world, learning computer skills must be a priority.
-Technology programs leverage support from the business community -- badly needed today because schools are increasingly starved for funds.
-Work with computers -- particularly using the Internet -- brings students valuable connections with teachers, other schools and students, and a wide network of professionals around the globe. These connections spice the school day with a sense of real-world relevance, and broaden the educational community...

With such a discouraging record of student and teacher performance with computers, why has the Clinton Administration focused so narrowly on the hopeful side of the story? Part of the answer may lie in the makeup of the Administration's technology task force. Judging from accounts of the task force's deliberations, all thirty-six members are unequivocal technology advocates. Two thirds of them work in the high-tech and entertainment industries...

When I spoke with Esther Dyson and other task-force members about what discussion the group had had about the potential downside of computerized education, they said there hadn't been any....
When I asked Dyson why the Clinton task force proceeded with such fervor, despite the classroom computer's shortcomings, she said, "It's so clear the world is changing."</sub>

"Rather than just meeting the needs of industry, these initiatives constitute a massive state intervention in socialization, a new science of youth in which notions of work preparation and life management are united, an attempt to technologize previous cultural patterns that are regarded as either inadequate or no longer produced naturally. As such, this constitutes a stategy which requires situating in the context of other control measures aimed at youth. We want to look at two aspects of the new pedagogy in particular: first profiling and assessment; and then the question of skills and competences. Profiling is at the core of panoptic discipline. It is central to that process whereby ever widening aspects of student life and identity are brought within scrutiny and the possibility is created for even stronger forms of social control and the pedagogic colonization of everyday life."
-Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, The Technical Fix: Education, computers and industry, 1989, page 218.

Sloan, D. (1985). The computer in education: A critical perspective. New York: Teachers College Press.

"The world is changing at a much faster pace today than one would have imagined a decade ago. The way innovations of yesteryears like internet and mobility transformed the world today; innovations of today would go on to transform the world tomorrow. In the words of William Wordsworth, ‘The child is father of man’. Quite rightly, the shape of future lies in the hands of today’s youth. The responsibility to shape young minds and prepare them for a new world rests on Education. The world needs to renounce some age old practices in its education system and adopt a futuristic pedagogy.

Core has been incubating innovations that are transforming the Education Systems worldwide – from the US to the UK; from India to the Middle East and Africa. With innovative interventions across Teaching, Learning, Assessment and Governance, the company is rigorously at work. Innovating today what will lead to a transformed world tomorrow.

The global agenda of the 21st century is set around economy and trade, with manufacturing shifting from the west to the east, employment landscape would immensely change at both ends. In order to sustain their economic growth, developed as well as developing economies need to intensify their human capital formation. Not surprising then, nations across the world are increasingly investing in education for continued development of their human capital, quantitatively as well as qualitatively.

With governments across the world stepping up their spends on reinventing their education system in line with the unfolding realities of 21st century, CORE is uniquely poised to leverage its established and fast improving domain prowess. In doing so, it would help nations enhance the productive capabilities of their future workforce and create immense value for all its stakeholders over coming decades.”
-CORE Education & Consulting Solutions, Inc. (CORE-ECS), CORE – Innovating To Transform The World, 2012 Annual Financial Report, page 3.
(Grammatical errors included.)

Schneider M, A Brief Audit of Bill Gates' Common Core Spending, Huffington Post, August 29, 2013.

"Enterprise Computing Services (ECS), an IT company based in Woodstock, Georgia, was founded by our CEO Shekhar Iyer in 1992.  In 2005, ECS was acquired by CORE Education and Technologies, Limited (CORE-ETL), headquartered in Mumbai, India, and was re-named CORE Education & Consulting Solutions, Inc., as the US arm of the global education company...CORE Education & Consulting Solutions, Inc. (CORE-ECS) is an end-to-end, education-focused, technology-enabled solutions provider.  Working with schools, districts and statewide agencies, CORE ECS delivers K-12 assessment and intervention solutions, technology infrastructure, special education management,  pre-k management applications and strategic staffing solutions. CORE ECS currently touches the lives of over 2,500,000 learners and 150,000 educators across the United States, advancing education through an integrated mosaic of innovative solutions.  CORE ECS was established based on the idea that customized, tailored content and “high touch” services  - combined with effective, useful reporting and technology  - have the power to transform education in the 21st century."
-CORE Education & Consulting Solutions, Inc. (CORE-ECS).

Hill A, 'Autism doesn't hold me back. I'm moving up the career ladder' Driven new generation of people with the condition are showing employers there is no limit to what they can do, The Guardian, March 8, 2013.

<sub>Penny Andrews got her job as a library graduate trainee at Leeds Metropolitan University in August without any help from a charity or specialist employment agency.

Having beaten 200 applicants to the job, she believes she has proved herself to be the best candidate. "Sometimes I feel people think I should be grateful that I have a job but I'm performing a useful task and doing it well, so they should be grateful to me," she said. "After all, they wanted me badly enough to employ me a month before I had finished my degree in IT and communications with the Open University."

Far from feeling that her diagnosis of Asperger's is something to be "got over", Andrews maintains it gave her a lead over the other candidates. "I was completely open about my autism throughout the interview process and even asked for a few special conditions to take account of my Asperger's, such as working from 8.30am to 4.30pm,for example, so I don't have to take the rush-hour bus home, taking extra breaks in a special quiet area if I need quiet, and not having to answer telephones."

They are small adjustments for her employers to make, she said, compared with the advantages her Asperger's gives them. "I'm more focused, intense and honest than a neuro-typical person," she said. "I do things thoroughly and pay proper attention to detail. I'm always switched on: even when I'm not at work, I'll go to events that are relevant. Libraries are one of my autistic specialities and I harness that at work."

Employers are increasingly coming round to the arguments from disability advocates that employing those on the spectrum is not about charity or social responsibility – but the empirical benefit of taking on people with unique skills.

Tom Madders is head of campaigns at the society and responsible for its Undiscovered Workforce campaign to get young people with autism into employment. He talks of a "vast pool of untapped talent" among those with autism.

"When someone has the intellectual ability and ends up doing a job like working in a supermarket, it's heartbreaking. It's such a waste because although everyone with autism is different, the things they bring that are additional to the rest of us include a very high concentration level, very good attention to detail and analytical skills that are key in data analysis and when looking for anomalies in complex spreadsheets," he said. "Why would employers want to miss out on those skills? In addition, those with autism have very specialist areas of exhaustive interest which, if these can coincide with the job in hand, can be extremely useful. They're much more reliable in terms of timeliness and absenteeism and very loyal. Often, they're very happy in jobs other people find boring."</sub>

Munn, N. D. (1992). The cultural anthropology of time: a critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology, 93-123.

<sub>Control over time is not just a strategy of interaction; it is also a medium of hierarchic power and governance...Authority over the annual calendar (the chronological definition, timing, and sequence of daily and seasonal activities), or of other chronological instruments like clock time, not only controls aspects of the everyday lives of persons but also connects this level of control to a more comprehensive universe that entails critical values and potencies in which governance is grounded.

Controlling these temporal media variously implies control over this more comprehensive order and its definition, as well as over the capacity to mediate this wider order into the fundamental social being and bodies of persons. Hence, the importance of calendric and related time shifts connected with sociopolitical changes is more than political in the narrow pragmatic sense. It has to do with the construction of cultural governance through reaching into the body time of persons and coordinating it with values embedded in the "worldtime" of a wider constructed universe of power.

The changing regulation of work time in the West with its so-called "commodification" of time also illustrates control over timing as a mode of governance grounding the person and daily activity in a wider world order...Clock time is thus concretized in experience reaching (partly through the sonorous bells and increasing visibility of the clock) into the body to fuse with body time and space and back out into the visible object world of clocks and bells which cohere with the wider cosmic order of industry, science, and technology... Considered in the context of daily activity, clock time is quite alive, embodied in purposeful activity and experience. Coordinately, people are ongoingly articulated through this temporalization into a wider politico-cosmic order, a world time of particular values and powers.

Examining the body's disciplining through the "temporal elaboration of the act," Foucault pursues this dynamic into the micro-level of body time. Commenting on an 18th-century French military ordinance on marching steps, he argues that an "anatomo-chronological" schema or "programme" for constructing an "obligatory rhythm" is set out which systematically segments the body into spatiotemporal units. These units retotalize bodily motion into a preplanned "rhythm" imposed by a "disciplinary" militancy. "Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power".</sub>

"And we absently delude ourselves that we know what time is because we know what time it is."
-John Zerzan, Time and its Discontents in Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, 2002, page 24.

"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous....In its relation to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire."
-Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934, page 14-15.

"The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct decendant of the clock."
-W. Daniel Hillis, 'The Clock' in The Greatest Invention of the Past 2,000 Years, ed., John Brockman, 2000, page 141.

"The difference between human beings and their instruments disappeared when saved time was valued more highly than given time."
-Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time,

"The foundations of human time, to this day, are not found in the tick-tocking of the clock but in the pulse of life flowing between people and within the body. Time is anchored in the beat of the heart and its systolic and diastolic phases. 'The drum,' Algonquin Cree elder Jacob Wawatie told me once, 'is an extension of the heart.' Long-short, long-short; the basic iambic beat, which has long been the heartbeat of culture, is mimicked in the beating of a drum marking time for dancing or the telling of traditional stories."
-Heather Menzies, No Time: Stress and the crisis of modern life, 2005, page 22.

Douglas, S., & Michaels, M. (2004). The new momism (pp. 1-27). E. Disch (Ed.). Introduction. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and how It has Undermined all Women. By Douglas, and Michaels. Toronto: Free Press.

Howell, J. P. (2010). Parents, watching: introducing surveillance into modern American parenting.

_{During the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been a significant expansion in the means by which parents in the United States might use technologies to watch their children. Watching and worrying about children are not new to the job of parenthood, but the ways of watching now available to parents represents a change of degree so great as to represent a change in kind. The parental gaze has become technologized. This dissertation investigates what happens when man-made devices insert themselves into this most basic of human endeavors.}

Marx, G. T., & Steeves, V. (2010). From the Beginning: Children as Subjects and Agents of Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 7.

_{This article examines the claims made by surveillance entrepreneurs selling surveillance to parents and government agencies responsible for children. Technologies examined include pre-natal testing, baby monitors and nanny cams, RFID-enabled clothing, GPS tracking devices, cell phones, home drug and semen tests, and surveillance toys. We argue that governments, both in the contest of health care and education, use surveillance to identify and “manage” genetic or behavioural deviations from the norm. Parents, on the other hand, are encouraged to buy surveillance technologies to keep the child “safe”. Although there is a secondary emphasis on parental convenience and freedom, surveillance is predominately offered as a necessary tool of responsible and loving parenting. Entrepreneurs also claim that parents cannot trust their children to behave in pro-social ways, and must resort to spying to overcome children’s tendency to lie and hide their bad behaviour. We conclude by offering some ideas to rein in the variety and complexity of the issues raised and to help order controversies in this domain.}

Rooney, T. (2010). Trusting Children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child's experience of trust, risk and responsibility?. Surveillance & Society, 7.

_{The growing use of new forms of surveillance technology across the day-to-day lives of children and the spaces they inhabit brings with it potential changes to childhood experience. These technologies may change the way children interact with others and the way they come to understand the world around them. This article investigates the nature of these changes by looking at the impact of new surveillance technologies on a child’s experience of trust. It aims to show that an increased surveillance presence across a child’s everyday activity may be denying children important opportunities both to trust others and to be trusted.}

Henderson, A. C., Harmon, S. M., & Houser, J. (2010). A New State of Surveillance? Applying Michel Foucault to Modern Motherhood. Surveillance & Society, 7.

_{This project analyzed how “New Momism” (Douglas & Michaels 2004) is perpetuated among contemporary mothers. Previous work has argued that New Momism is most powerfully represented through the media. Our results indicate that New Momism is also practiced intensively on an interpersonal level via Michel Foucault’s (1975) Panopticonic stage of punishment: poststructuralist surveillance. We analyzed data from a snowball sample of 323 mothers through an online survey tool. Results indicate that while the media remains an important influence, the strongest predictors of New Momism are surveillance of fellow moms (p<.05) and surveillance of self through guilt (p<.001). Results are discussed in light of Foucault’s conceptualization of post-
structuralist surveillance.}

Sparrman, A., & Lindgren, A. L. (2010). Visual Documentation as a Normalizing Practice: A New Discourse of Visibility in Preschool. Surveillance & Society, 7.

<sub>The visual documentation of education for pedagogical purposes focuses on preschool children’s activities and is used by educators to improve their understanding of children while strengthening their own professionalism. By analysing three educational TV programmes concerning visual documentation in preschools, this paper challenges the positivistic way visual documentation is portrayed. Moreover, it questions political documents and the TV programmes’ unproblematic description of children as always ready to be visually documented. Applying a child perspective and children’s perspectives, the paper demonstrates that there is a fine line between being documented and surveilled using visual technologies. The paper describes how doing on-looking-ness (onlooker) versus being looked-at-ness (looked at) can be understood as specific discursive formations.

Children today are thus repeatedly video recorded for various purposes, by various people, in various contexts, and using different technologies (e.g., cell phones, digital video cameras, and fixed surveillance cameras). What might it mean to be brought up in an environment where being repeatedly looked at and monitored by video lenses is regarded as normal? Could the visual documentation practices used in everyday childhood institutions be regarded as training children to uncritical acceptance of surveillance techniques that are used with increasing frequency in western societies?</sub>

Katz, C. (2006). The state goes home: Local hypervigilance of children and the global retreat from social reproduction. Surveillance and security: Technological politics and power in everyday life, 27-36.

_{IN AN EARLY SCENE IN THE TERMINATOR, THE CYBORGIAN ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER walks into an L.A. gun shop and asks to see the wares. The shopkeeper lays out Uzis, submachine guns, rocket launchers, and other sophisticated means of overkill, nervously understating, "Any one of these will suit you for home defense purposes." The situation is likewise in the growing child protection industry. In keeping with the shopkeeper's sly comment, these businesses feast on an all-pervasive culture of fear, while creating a mockery, alibi, and distraction out of what they are really about -- to remake the home as a citadel through the peddling of private protective technologies that reinforce it against various forms of intrusion. These industries offer utterly inappropriate technocratic solutions for broad social problems. More important, the growth of the child protection industry is yet another response to the venomous and slippery fear-of-crime discourse that has become one of the key stocks in trade of the neoliberal state.}

Franklin, L., & Cromby, J. (2009). Everyday Fear: parenting and childhood in a culture of fear. The many forms of fear, horror and terror, 161-174.

_{In a media fuelled society we are never far from hearing stories of paedophiles, abductions, health scares, recession, and violent crime. The lived world can often seem more terrifying than that portrayed in horror movies, as we hear tales of body parts being found in fields and fathers imprisoning their daughters in the basement for decades. The media acts to reinforce our material experiences of increasing individualisation, changing family structures, and decreasing community. Together, these symbolic and material influences constitute a fearful culture where we are mistrustful of fellow human beings, uncertain about the future, and subject to free-floating anxiety. The family unit is where this culture of fear is perhaps most visible as the relationship between adults and children is seemingly more fraught than ever. Child rearing is no longer a shared social responsibility, but is confined to the immediate family, while strangers are viewed with a mistrust that comes easily. Parents are bombarded with conflicting advice from ‘experts’ and battle to walk the line between allowing their children to be ‘free range’ and wrapping them in cotton wool. This paper explores some of the ways that this everyday fear is impacting on parenting and childhood.}

"If a young mother were to ask me what I consider the keynote of successful baby training, I should say, without hesitation, regularity. This means regularity in everything, eating, sleeping, bathing, bowel habits, and exercise. Each event in a baby's daily life should take place at exactly the same hour by the clock until the habit is established...
It is quite possible to train the baby to be an efficient little machine, and the more nearly perfect we make the running of this machine, the more wonderful will be the results achieved and the less trouble it will be for the mother.
The time to start training is at birth. But one need not despair if the ideal is not accomplished immediately. It is best, though, to make out a schedule that you expect to carry out under ordinary circumstances, and then follow it without deviation until the habits become automatic."
-Myrtle Eldren and Helen Le Cron, For the Young Mother, 1921.

"At the beginning of this century, the morality of the middle class was still tied to Victorian ideals, but technology was carrying the parents and children into another world. A time of optimism, everything seemed possible. If science could prevent disease, as Koch and Pasteur had shown, why couldn't it also prevent psychological disorder? And social disorder? Personal failure and poverty? If technology could guarantee consistency in manufactured goods, why couldn't it also guarantee the production of consistently wonderful children?"
-Daniel Beekman, The Mechanical Baby, A Popular History of the Theory and Practice of Child Raising, 1977, page 112.


"The publication of Dr. Holt's Care and Feeding of Children marked an epoch. It conveyed to the mothers of the generation to which it was addressed the idea of a positive regimen of right physical habits as essential to the child's health and well-being. Previous to this mothers had brought their children up by rule of thumb, the child's desires being the gauge of the mother's behavior. Thus, if a baby cried he was fed, if he was fretful he was rocked or dandled, if he had colic he was walked the floor with, this being accepted as all in a day's work in bringing up baby. All this Dr. Holt and his followers significantly changed. Instead of the baby's demands the routine laid down by the specialist prescribed the rule for the mother to follow. Regular times of feeding and hours of sleep, freedom from distraction, were all secured for the child with startling results in his health and happiness. Besides demonstrating the importance of a good routine for health, such a system of training did more; it taught mothers to respect the welfare of the child and to make this their first consideration...Once the importance of regularity and consistency in physical care was grasped, the old, careless practices stood condemned. We may hope to see an analogous respect for the mental integrity of the child as a result of improved methods of mental training."
-William E. Blatz and Helen Bott, Parents and the Pre-School Child, 1929.

Davis-Floyd, R. E. (1994). The technocratic body: American childbirth as cultural expression. Social Science & Medicine, 38(8), 1125-1140.

<sub>The dominant mythology of a culture is often displayed in the rituals with which it surrounds birth. In contemporary Western society, that mythology--the mythology of the technocracy--is enacted through obstetrical procedures, the rituals of hospital birth. This article explores the links between our culture's mythological technocratic model of birth and the body images, individual belief and value systems, and birth choices of forty middle-class women--32 professional women who accept the technocratic paradigm, and eight homebirthers who reject it.

The conceptual separation of mother and child is fundamental to technocratic notions of parenthood, and constitutes a logical corollary of the Cartesian mind-body separation that has been fundamental to the development of both industrial society and post-industrial technocracy. The professionals' body images and lifestyles express these principles of separation, while the holistic ideology of the homebirthers stresses mind-body and parent-child integration. The conclusion considers the ideological hegemony of the technocratic paradigm as future shaper.

In technocratic reality, not only are mother and baby viewed as separate, but the best interests of each are often perceived as conflicting. In such circumstances, the mother's emotional needs and desires are almost always subordinated to the medical interpretation of the best interests of the baby as the all-important product of this "manufacturing process." Thus, individuals operating under this paradigm often criticize home-birthers as "selfish" and "irresponsible" for putting their own desires above their baby's needs. But under the holistic paradigm held by these home birthers, just as mother and baby form part of one integral and indivisible unit until birth, so the safety of the baby and the emotional needs of the mother are also One. The safest birth for the baby will be the one that provides the most nurturing environment for the mother.</sub>

Wow, continued:

Francisco Goya

Albrecht Durer

Alex Grey

Curiot

Freddie Baer

Robbie Conal