Surveillance | MUSEUM FATIGUE

“Scan & Go” at Watson’s: Checking Out on the Sales Floor

January 24, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday for the first time I experienced a retail store employee as a “checkout point.” I visited a nearby Watson’s store to buy a pack of Bandaids and when I went to the cashier’s counter to pay for my purchase, I noticed a sign that said, “Scan & Go” in English and Chinese. I was a bit mystified because for most of the past two years I always pay with things by “scanning and going”—pulling out my phone, opening Alipay, […]

Categories: Digital Payments, Retail, Surveillance, Technology • Tags: Alipay, WeChat

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When Good Means Failing: Resisting Corporate Satisfaction Surveys

August 10, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning before checking out of our hotel, I noticed a letter on the desk in the room. The letter, written by the local hotel’s General Manager, mentioned that we might be receiving a satisfaction survey from corporate Best Western by email within a few weeks. The letter encouraged us to be sure and be “extremely satisfied” with our stay. In fact, if we weren’t extremely satisfied, the letter entreated us to contact the general manager directly by email or […]

Categories: Consumption, Corporate Culture, Discipline, Surveillance • Tags: Best Western, customer satisfaction, hotels, service industry, surveys

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Gold, DVDs, Surveillance Cameras and Meat: Supplies for the End Times

August 7, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: End of Times, Surveillance • Tags: apocalypse, cameras, DVD, food, gold

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Anti-Cheating Posters on Chinese University Campus

June 26, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

A few days ago I just happened to be visiting a university campus in the outskirts of Shanghai during the beginning of finals week. Along one wall in the lobby of the teaching building I noted a number of very interesting posters discouraging cheating on tests. Done in different styles they all had a singular message—don’t cheat on your finals. I imagined how a similar set of posters posted on an American campus would be received by students taking tests […]

Categories: Education, Surveillance • Tags: cheating, China, final exam, posters, testing

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Museum Fatigue Reads, April 12, 2014

April 12, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

香港將於33年後毀滅 Hong Kong will be destroyed after 33 years Tiananmen Conference 2014: Keeping the Memory Alive at Harvard Say Goodbye to ‘Peaceful Unification’ Medicinal Soft Drinks and Coca-Cola Fiends: The Toxic History of Soda Pop Jail House Recipes: Prison Cuizine Jennifer 8 Lee: The Hunt For General Tso Ephemera: Ethics of the Brand Why We’re in a New Gilded Age Aral: Fishing […]

Categories: Food, Surveillance • Tags: Aral Sea, brands, Coca-Cola, Hong Kong, Peaceful Unification, recipies, Science Fiction, storytelling, surveillance, Taiwan, Tiananamen, Tiananmen Conference, Windows XP

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Facebook’s Tiers of Selling Your Information

January 28, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“If you aren’t paying for the product, you’re the product” never really made much concrete sense until this morning. The folks over at Boing Boing posted an image from @TheBakeryLDN illustrating what companies know when customers login to their services via Facebook. I suppose much of this could be expected, I posted about the increasingly insistent and irritating way that Facebook tells me it wants my data a few months ago (“The Facebook Database Must Be Fed”) complete with Little […]

Categories: Bodies, Privacy, Surveillance • Tags: digital double, Facebook, Privacy, Social Media

Surveillance Graffiti

January 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Photo Essays, Public Art, Surveillance • Tags: graffiti, Morocco

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What Weibo Wipes: A Collection of Censored Images

November 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Sometime this last week a colleague shared a link to a very interesting collection of images erased from the Weibo microblogging website (“China’s Twitter”). The collection is being made by ProPublica and also includes some very interesting related articles about online censorship in China, such as “How to Get Censored on China’s Twitter.” I saved the link and didn’t really get a chance to look through it until last night. What an interesting collection it is—and most of the images have basic […]

Categories: China, Internet, Scripts, Surveillance, Visual Anthropology • Tags: censorship, censorship in China, ProPublica, social web, Weibo

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Beijing Sunset

October 30, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Thanks to high levels of pollution in the air, today Beijing “enjoyed” a sunset that lasted much of the afternoon. Driving home sometime around 4pm, making our way through the clogged streets in the thick pollution, I couldn’t help imagine that I wasn’t in the present but in a not too distant post-apocalyptic future of environmental devastation. Then again, who said apocalypses have to arrive suddenly? Maybe they can creep up slowly like a car in Beijing traffic.

Categories: China, End of Times, Environment, Surveillance, Urban • Tags: automobiles, Beijing, cctv, pollution, smog, sunset

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Mystery Object #10: Brass Private Property Sign

August 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last week, while walking on the sidewalk up the street toward Market Square in Pittsburg, PA, I noticed a small brass plaque mounted in the brick sidewalk at the edge of the street at the corner of Forbes Ave and Delray Street. It simply said, PRIVATE PROPERTY. The brass and brick made the simple message—about the size of a business card—seem proper or even classy. That it was written in all caps and even needed to be there in the first place, however, […]

Categories: Discipline, Mystery Objects, Space, Surveillance • Tags: Occupy Wall Street, Pittsburg

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