Practicing Applied linguistics in a surveillance society (Plenary Address)

Increasingly nearly every facet of our lives from everyday purchases to participation in social media is subject to surveillance. This paper explores the contributions that applied linguistics can make to recent debates about government and corporate surveillance, personal privacy, and civil liberties associated with digital technologies. It also explores the theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges that the rise of the ‘surveillance society’ present to our field. In particular I examine the pragmatic and discursive strategies used by governments and private companies to make citizens and customers compliant partners in regimes of surveillance. I begin by reviewing the debates around surveillance and civil liberties in the media and political discourse, showing that underlying these debates are fundamental arguments about the way concepts central to the study of applied linguistics such as ‘information’, ‘communication’, ‘speaker’, ‘listener’, ‘identity’ and ‘interaction’ are understood. I then go on to discuss how tools developed over the years by applied linguists, especially in the areas of interactional sociolinguistics and mediated discourse analysis, can help us to understand how people are lured into willingly giving up information about themselves, how information and identity change as they move from one context to another, how simple actions we may not consider discursive take on meaning and become part of narratives and databases about us, and the role of media and language in constructing or undermining different architectures of access to and control of information in social interaction. Finally, I discuss how the new the surveillance society made possible by digital technologies will force applied linguists to rethink what they do and how they do it in terms of 1) our theoretical understanding of language and social interaction, 2) the methodological tools we use to gather and analyze data, and 3) the ethical responsibilities we have to address issues of privacy and power, to challenge the practices of governments and corporations, and to explore the relationship between language and communication and fundamental rights related to anonymity, confidentiality and privacy.