Leisure as Surveillance, and the Surveillance of Leisure

Abstract

Introduction: Leisure in the surveillance society?This special issue centralizes questions of leisure and "the problem(s)" of surveillance.While some leisure scholarship has focused on surveillance (Jordan & Aitchison, 2008;Rose & Spencer, 2016;Silk, Millington, Rich & Bush, 2016), we believe further attention is warranted, not least because of the incredible permeation and "deep mediatization" (Couldry & Hepp, 2020) of digital leisure in everyday life.This brief introductory article explores how leisure is a crucial node for the ascendance of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and how the experience of leisure itself is changing as a result.While various forms of electronic surveillance have existed since the 1860s (Hochman, 2018), in the last quarter-century, with the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, mobile devices, and various "smart" technologies, the collection, cataloging, and monitoring of our everyday lives have become nearly ubiquitous (Agur & Frisch, 2019;Bauman, Bigo, Esteves, Guild, Jabri, Lyon & Walker, 2014;Crary, 2013;Fasman, 2021;Goodyear, Kerner & Quennerstedt, 2019;Price, 2014).Implications for leisure are numerous.Once primarily the domain of science-fiction (Lashua, 2018), leisure in the surveillance society has become science-fact.An entire genre of fiction from 1950-1980 focuses on the dangers of surveillance to individual and collective liberty (Lyon, 2018).If not (yet) as insidious as George Orwell's (1948) vision of an omnipresent, authoritarian "Big Brother" in his dystopian novel, 1984, instead, surveillance has become increasingly nuanced, fluid, and seductive in contemporary society and everyday leisure.This nuance can be seen also in contemporary literature, such as Dave Eggars' recent novel The Every (2021).In this book, Eggars describes a capitalist system that proliferates through tracking every movement of consumer's lives.A prescient, if fictionalized, critical social commentary, The Every builds on ideas in Shoshana Zuboff 's (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which argued that most people will trade collective freedoms and individual privacy for a leisure lifestyle of consumer convenience.A recent feature in The Washington Post (Fowler, 2022) illustrated the growing pervasiveness of surveillance leisure technologies.Documenting in minute detail how the "Amazon Smart Home" tracks its users' leisure, Fowler concluded: "it's also a surveillance nightmare.Many of Amazon's products contribute to its detailed profile of you, helping it know you better than you know yourself."When so much of

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