[NetBehaviour] THE VIRTUAL WATCHERS - Crowdsourcing National Security through, Social Media

[freeautomatisms]

Dear list,

THE VIRTUAL WATCHERS [http://www.virtualwatchers.de/] is a project
developed by artist Joana Moll and anthropologist Marius Pé that
questions the dynamics of crowdsoucing the national security and border
control. The piece looks into a Facebook group that gathered
volunteering citizens that executed surveillance on the US-Mexico border
from the Internet using a publicly funded online platform. The declared
aim of this operation was to bring American citizens to participate in
reducing border crime and block the entrance of illegal immigration to
the US. The platform allowed the users to watch the border and make
anonymous reports to the authorities if noticing illegal activity.

The project offers an interactive window that allows the public to
dive into the conversations, jokes, and questionings of the Facebook
group that gathered some of the volunteering citizens that actively used
this platform. By doing so, it aims at highlighting to what extent the
emotional investment and exchanges of these people work as an essential
mechanism in the construction and legitimization of a post-panoptic system.

Link to the project: http://www.virtualwatchers.de/