From Winston's Red Book to the Black Mirror: Control Devices in the Surveillance Society

This article presents a theoretical reflection on surveillance as a guarantor of social order. It states that the new surveillance assembly that started with the launch of the Internet tends towards absolute control of life through direct and violent coercion, or entertainment and fun. It deals with three significant surveillance devices, namely, panoptic as a meeting point between the disciplinary society we no longer are and the surveillance society we are becoming; synoptic or the monitoring and surveillance of private, intimate and emotional life; and predictive analytics or the preference for finding correlations among millions of available everyday data that intends, if not to explain the cause of phenomena, to look for new forms of coercion. The reasons why the operation of these devices makes contemporary society a surveillance society are also explored. In expounding the characteristics of each of these devices, the article aims to reveal the role of surveillance in regulating social life. Finally, it reflects on the loss of freedom that brings about the trust and security gained as a result of voluntary or sometimes thoughtless submission to new, subtle and apparently innocent modes of control such as joining social media, subscribing to electronic services, or using any of the most popular search engines