Surveillance on the Web (whether it's surveillance of images, student writing, etc.) ultimately is about competing definitions of authorship
ranging from:
1. author as
god
2. author as
voyeur
3. author as
cyborg
Authoring as god is about control, about watching everyone's movement at
all times, or at least in a
Foucauldian sense, of having the ability to. The
author-god is concerned primarily with controlling who has
access to surveillance,
to extending his or her gaze over others. The author-god exerts
power through surveillance.
Author as voyeur manifests itself through daily minutae, the
chia pets and
feet of others, never really putting the pieces together into a coherent
road map of his or her surroundings. The voyeur possesses snapshots, but not a photo album.
Author as cyborg looks for a radical redefinition of what it means
to be human--to put together a coherent road map, to alternate gazes
between voyeur and god, to do something productive for oneself with it. As a practical example, instructors of writing might share the responsibility (and corresponding gazes) for grading (including the creation of criteria) with their students.
