Philip Agre’s work Surveillance and Capture got a lot of attention and became a comprehensive guide in the field of surveillance. The essay introduces two models of privacy – surveillance model and capture model. Each model is well described by providing a context and examples, meanwhile comparing with each other and emphasizing the differences.

Surveillance can be described as contentious 24/7  monitoring while capture can be defined as the data collecting. Surveillance carries more visual metaphors such as “watching” – more like political. Whereas, capture represents linguistic metaphors – more like philosophical. To get more insights Arge lists the five components of each model. I see that conversations about digital surveillance and privacy started since 80’s, but it become a mainstream recently where surveillance model is having a dominant role. However, the concept of surveillance has existed a long before as people have defined justice and morality.

It turns out that the author, keen internet pioneer Philip Agre went missing once, but was found after couple month without giving any public explanation about circumstances. The interesting point here is that he could be able hide completely unnoticeable by leaving no trace. A coincidence ?