People watching: Abstractions and orthodoxies of monitoring

• Published in: Technology in society 2023-02, Vol.72, p.102178, Article 102178
• Main Authors: Wang, Victoria, Tucker, John V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Data; Interventions; Monitoring; Software; Surveillance
• ISSN: 0160-791X; 1879-3274
• DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2022.102178

Our society has an insatiable appetite for data. Much of the data is collected to monitor the activities of people, e.g., for discovering the purchasing behaviour of customers, observing the users of apps, managing the performance of personnel, and conforming to regulations and laws, etc. Although monitoring practices are ubiquitous, monitoring as a general concept has received little analytical attention. We explore: (i) the nature of monitoring facilitated by software; (ii) the structure of monitoring processes; and (iii) the classification of monitoring systems. We propose an abstract definition of monitoring as a theoretical tool to analyse, document, and compare disparate monitoring applications. For us, monitoring is simply the systematic collection of data about the behaviour of people and objects. We then extend this concept with mechanisms for detecting events that require interventions and changes in behaviour, and describe five types of monitoring. We argue for the development of a general theory of monitoring. •Monitoring is explored as an independent subject area.•Monitoring as a process that observes people or objects.•Information recorded by monitoring can initiate actions named interventions.•Interventions that specify or reveal what the monitoring data is used for.