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.