Technological Determinism & Social Shaping of Technology / Digital Veillance
Kimberly, Pamela, Devon, Eamonn, Paige, Orion
Technological Determinism in Minority Report
The movie attempts to heavily separate itself from hard determinism which holds the viewpoint that technology operates as an autonomous system that humans cannot alter one way or another. In this film, the technology is only based on humans but in fact is reliant upon them and even shuts down after one of the “pre-cogs” (who are humans although advanced) is taken away from the system. As the film progresses, a conclusion is also alluded to that the system can fall apart when a person who has knowledge of the crime can change their actions. Thereby overcoming the technology and rendering the system useless. Our concept of veillance and surveillance is particularly prevalent is this film based on the simple idea that the pre-crime division based entirely on three biologically advanced humans (the pre-cogs) watching over all of the population of Washington DC. This is an example of the few watching the many in order to control their actions, which is also referred to as panoptic surveillance.
Social Shaping of Technology with Minority Report
Technology played a major role in enabling murders to be foreseen, in depth analysis of the vision, and then helps the precrime unit locate and arrest the murderer.It highly advanced in each scene of the film, displayed as: cars, the precogs, the precrime unit, marketing by eye scanners, antibiotics, street drugs, and the home of John Anderton. With the overload of technology, society in “Minority Report” relies on technology to go about their lives from shopping to traveling to and from work and home, and even base their career on it. The social shaping of society is a theory founded on the idea that society and technology shape each other but neither is exclusively the cause or effect of the other. One could argue that this film leans towards this viewpoint which holds that the path of innovation of technology is based on society. And since the pre-crime is shut down because of the actions of people (namely Leo Crow and John), the film could support this theory. Although this film could also be used to argue against this theory since the pre-crime division was created as a response to the “homicide epidemic” described in the film which encourages a more simplistic cause and effect relationship.
Minority Report and it’s relation to digital surveillance / veillance
The film is a great example of the panoptic veillance where the many watch the few. It could be said that the subcategory of ban-optic veillance is also used because those who are determined to commit a crime in the future are singled out by the few and excluded from society so they do not do their predicted actions. The theory of uberveillance could also apply to the film with the vast amount of retinal scans that the people in the film experience as the walk about their daily life. The advertisements were even individualized for the person that walked by them. uberveillance is described in Deborah Lupton’s Theorizing Digital Society as veillance that collects mass amounts of geolocational and biometric data through chips in everyday items that we use or interact with. Sources: Minority Report, 2002 Lupton, Deborah, 2014. “Theorizing Digital Society”