TY - JOUR
T1 - Authority, sensory power and the appification of bio citizenship: from tracking the pandemic to vaccine passports
AU - Alevizou, Giota
AU - Murchison, Eve
N1 - Dr Giota Alevizou is a lecturer in Humanistic Computing at the Department of
Digital Humanities at King's College London (KCL). She has expertise on
the historical and political economic aspects of digital transformation, particularly on the ways in which data literacies, ethics and citizenship intersect with information politics, knowledge and education cultures. She has published widely on cultural politics of digital & knowledge media, collective intelligence and civic technologies.
PY - 2023/5/31
Y1 - 2023/5/31
N2 - This paper examines how authority and governmentality were enacted through digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the proliferation of track and trace apps, as well as digital vaccine passports, the contemporary ‘biocitizen’ became someone who was at once participatory and sacrificial for the ‘greater good’. Advancing a notion of sensory power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) and app-enabled ‘biopolitical authority’ as a novel form of governmentality, this paper explores how the tracking and monitoring of individual bodies renders them ‘sense-able beings’ through the devices, apps, and platforms that they engage with. Drawing on a discourse-oriented analysis of UK-based government visuals and news reports surrounding the promotion (and controversies) of tracking apps and vaccine passports, we demonstrate that partaking in society as a ‘good’ biocitizen meant allowing COVID-19 technologies to pre-empt and influence bodily movements on both a micro and macro scale. As such we argue that COVID-19 technologies, ranging from tracking apps to vaccine passports, became ‘pre-emptive’ technologies that codified human bodies and their infectious status through alerts and notifications, which in turn, validated and reified a sense of belonging as a good and healthy ‘biocitizen’. This paper will unpack these themes to propose ways in which sensory power was deployed to organise and structure societies, first at a responsibilised individual level, and then as a societal collective, throughout the pandemic. In doing so, this paper seeks to address the varying forms of control that came out of the pandemic, as well as the social implications that they then had on biocitizenship and belonging.
AB - This paper examines how authority and governmentality were enacted through digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the proliferation of track and trace apps, as well as digital vaccine passports, the contemporary ‘biocitizen’ became someone who was at once participatory and sacrificial for the ‘greater good’. Advancing a notion of sensory power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) and app-enabled ‘biopolitical authority’ as a novel form of governmentality, this paper explores how the tracking and monitoring of individual bodies renders them ‘sense-able beings’ through the devices, apps, and platforms that they engage with. Drawing on a discourse-oriented analysis of UK-based government visuals and news reports surrounding the promotion (and controversies) of tracking apps and vaccine passports, we demonstrate that partaking in society as a ‘good’ biocitizen meant allowing COVID-19 technologies to pre-empt and influence bodily movements on both a micro and macro scale. As such we argue that COVID-19 technologies, ranging from tracking apps to vaccine passports, became ‘pre-emptive’ technologies that codified human bodies and their infectious status through alerts and notifications, which in turn, validated and reified a sense of belonging as a good and healthy ‘biocitizen’. This paper will unpack these themes to propose ways in which sensory power was deployed to organise and structure societies, first at a responsibilised individual level, and then as a societal collective, throughout the pandemic. In doing so, this paper seeks to address the varying forms of control that came out of the pandemic, as well as the social implications that they then had on biocitizenship and belonging.
KW - Authority
KW - biopower
KW - Biopolitics
KW - Digital communication
KW - Digital Culture
KW - sensory
KW - power
KW - media theory
KW - Covid-19
KW - vaccine communication
KW - TRACKING
U2 - https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2022-080103
DO - https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2022-080103
M3 - Article
SN - 2364-2122
VL - 8
SP - 13
EP - 42
JO - Digital Culture and Society
JF - Digital Culture and Society
IS - 1
ER -
