Surviving the Electronic Panopticon: New Lessons in Democracy, Surveillance, and Community in Young Adult Fiction

Abstract

Cities continue to be a subject of interest for researchers working across diverse disciplines. While empirical studies provide insights into people’s perceptions of the economic, political, and social dimensions of the urban condition, literature studies also provide a way for writers and readers to reimagine cities and understand their symbolic and cultural significance. When the target audience is young people, there are invariably new lessons that these fictions impart with respect to ways cities as utopian or dystopian spaces may both protect and restrict citizens’ rights and freedom. This paradoxical situation of protection and restriction is an outcome of the global use of systems of smart security, including smart sensing tools. While these systems and tools provide information for crime detection and protection of vulnerable citizens, they also amass data on individual citizens, which contravenes their rights to privacy. This much-debated issue of privacy is not only one that is part of legal and social rights discourses but it is also one that is featured in fiction written for young adults: a genre that often taps into young people’s developing sense of identity, social entrepreneurism, and political awareness. As children’s literature scholars Bradford et al. (2008: 2) note, the field “is marked by a pervasive commitment to social practice, and particularly to representing or interrogating those social practices deemed worthy of preservation, cultivation, or augmentation, and those deemed to be in need of reconceiving or discarding.” This chapter examines how a selection of popular young adult (YA) fiction represents and imaginatively constructs cities and their social practices of security in an age of increasing surveillance due to a growing unease about terrorism and other crimes that are often perpetrated within the urban space. The discussion reworks Michel Foucault’s concept of the panopticon as a metaphor of surveillance.