In the Right Place at the Right Time: Electronic Tagging and Problems of Social Order/Disorder

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between technology and problems of social order/disorder in the context of discussions of surveillance and ‘virtuality'. The emphasis is on understanding the connections between technology and social relations in areas where issues of social order/disorder are a prominent feature of concern and where one can identify the emergence of new regimes of virtual control which are directed at solving the (supposed) deficits in order or the threats posed to it. Rather than constituting a ‘technical fix’ for the problems of social order/disorder, it is argued that forms of virtual control both presuppose a reconstruction of social order and at the same time aim to effect a suppression of disorder. Focusing in particular on various manifestations of electronic tagging – from prisoners to babies, from retail goods to works of art, from television programmes to Personal Identification Numbers – the paper argues that these share a problematic which interrelates technology, order/disorder, subjects/objects, time, and space. It thus seeks to generalize the concept of electronic tagging, to regard it as a practice rather than a specific set of artefacts. Moreover, in contrast to the negative, panoptic reading of tagging technologies, the paper considers the active public participation in systems of surveillance and thereby the more positive or productive exercises of power which they may be taken to constitute.