Koops,Bert-Jaap. 2022. Goodbye to Publications, or Confessions of a Privacy Law Scholar' by Bert-Jaap Koops in (2022) 20(3) Surveillance & Society 312-316 comments
Privacy and surveillance scholars, myself included, publish too much and read too little. That is basically the abstract for this opinion piece. So, if you’ve got the message, you can stop reading. On second thoughts, if you’ve got the message, maybe you should continue reading.
My first response to the invitation to contribute to this Dialogue was: “Great idea. There are so many connections between surveillance and privacy scholarship.” Normally, I would think of a topical technological development, something like facial recognition, with, of course, the obligatory reference to artificial intelligence. I would identify two privacy challenges and write something sensible about how surveillance theory could help regulators to address these challenges. A few days’ work, and yet another item to add to my bulky publication list (thank you, Bryce and Scott!).
My second response was: “Wait. Hasn’t Julie Cohen already written on this, something reasonably definitive?” [Yes, she has (Cohen 2015), even if that was on law generally, not privacy law specifically.] And don’t the two communities of surveillance studies and privacy law already know sufficiently of each other’s existence? Privacy scholars know the basics of surveillance theory (or they shouldn’t call themselves privacy scholars), just as surveillance scholars know basic privacy theory and some privacy law (or at least know their Warren and Brandeis and Westin). And why surveillance studies and privacy law, specifically? Each discipline is surrounded by ten neighboring disciplines that inform it, so the same exercise could be done for, say, surveillance studies and media studies, or privacy law and social psychology.
As the section editors suggested in their invitation, the potential synergies of the two related disciplines seem underutilized, and it is useful for both fields to discuss how their discipline’s scholarship might benefit from additional cross-pollination. True enough. The editors particularly invited reflections on how these fields’ disciplinary orientations constrain inquiry. But that, I think, is not the real issue. The mainissue is that there is so much knowledge out there already in both fields and, with a little effort, scholars could easily find it if they wanted to, but they don’t. Want to, I mean. Or perhaps they would want to if this were an ideal world, but alas, it isn’t. Scholars simply don’t have time to read each other’s work, because they have to write.
My third response, therefore, was: “Thanks, but no, thanks.” I shouldn’t be contributing to our collective drowning in the publication deluge. Except, perhaps, to make explicit what I assume many often think but dare not say aloud: shouldn’t we stop running on this publication treadmill to churn out the so-manieth paper on the normative implications of phenomenon X from the perspective of Y, and do some serious reading instead?
Hence my fourth response: “The only meaningful thing I can think of is a meta-ish opinion piece reflecting about the lack of real discussion in the literature and its potential causes and consequences.” Which resulted in the piece you are now reading, or rather, skimming through because you don’t really have time to read. Hence the seemingly flippant style, which you will realize is a rhetorical device to entice you to keep on reading. I mean, skimming.
