I am pushing myself to write here on Kin Lane, but also Alternate Kin Lane daily. I have a story series I am trying to twist the perspective in the way I narratie it. I am pushing myself to think more about how technology is used for surveillance and I was working my way through the common perspectives or “person” to write from, but thinking about how I can twist things a bit for this authoritarian moment we find ourselves in.
- First person is the I/we perspective.
- Second person is the you perspective.
- Third person is the he/she/it/they perspective
All three of these fit into how I want to narrative these stories, but I feel like there are some nuances and constraints in a digital and physical world that provide an opportunity to bend these rules. My first thought was to propose a hypothetical fourth “surveillance person” which would always be from the “we” perspective. But then I begin thinking about the different vantage points available to work from when writing in the surveillance perspective.
- Cell Phone (App, Social, SMS, Chat, Photos, Videos, Audio, GPS)
- Laptop (App, Social, Videos, Browser)
- Television
- Automobile
- Surveillance Camera
- Voice Enable
- Wearable
- Police
- Employer
- Key FOB
- Street Cameras
- Kindle Reader
- Log Files
I am looking to speak from a perspective across all of these digital vantage points in your online and offline world. There are likely others vantage points I will want to consider, but these provide me with what I am looking to accomplish in the first series of stories. Next I will be crafting narratives that attempt to speak in a surveillance perspective across these areas. I feel like this will help be work through which pronouns apply. The perspective has an omniscient aspect to it, but it is one with a lot of constraints, so I don’t think that is the right word to use.
It kind of feels like there is no individual in any of this, and he/she/it is to close to the humanity of things. I feel like you and they apply from select vantage points, or, do I want to ordain some sort of collective agency to the surveillance perspective? Is the we all of us, or is we all of the surveillance technologies in use, or some higher level consciousness or artificial intelligence? Lots of questions. It will take a lot more storytelling on Alternate Kin Lane to answer any of these questions, but I wanted to make sure I was thinking through this before I just dive right on in.
