Journal article 678 views
People watching: Abstractions and orthodoxies of monitoring
Victoria Wang 
,
John Tucker
,
John Tucker
Technology in Society, Volume: 72, Start page: 102178
Swansea University Author:
John Tucker
DOI (Published version): 10.1016/j.techsoc.2022.102178
Abstract
Our society has an insatiable appetite for data. Much of the data is collected to monitor the activities of people, e.g., for discovering the purchasing behaviour of customers, observing the users of apps, managing the performance of personnel, and conforming to regulations and laws, etc. Although m...
| Published in: | Technology in Society |
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| ISSN: | 0160-791X |
| Published: |
Elsevier BV
2023
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| Online Access: |
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa62021 |
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| Abstract: |
Our society has an insatiable appetite for data. Much of the data is collected to monitor the activities of people, e.g., for discovering the purchasing behaviour of customers, observing the users of apps, managing the performance of personnel, and conforming to regulations and laws, etc. Although monitoring practices are ubiquitous, monitoring as a general concept has received little analytical attention. We explore: (i) the nature of monitoring facilitated by software; (ii) the structure of monitoring processes; and (iii) the classification of monitoring systems. We propose an abstract definition of monitoring as a theoretical tool to analyse, document, and compare disparate monitoring applications. For us, monitoring is simply the systematic collection of data about the behaviour of people and objects. We then extend this concept with mechanisms for detecting events that require interventions and changes in behaviour, and describe five types of monitoring.We argue for the development of a general theory of monitoring. |
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| Keywords: |
Monitoring; Interventions; Software; Data; Surveillance |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Start Page: |
102178 |