Chapter 5 Self-Assessment Quiz: Power, Knowledge, and the Gaze

Instructions: Complete without consulting the chapter. This quiz is cumulative — it tests concepts from all of Part 1 as well as Chapter 5 specifically. Target score: 15/20.

Estimated Time: 35–45 minutes

Part A: Multiple Choice (1 point each)

1. Foucault's claim that power is "productive" means:

a) Power produces economic goods through the efficient management of the workforce b) Power is not primarily repressive but creates subjects, produces knowledge, and generates desires and identities c) Power that is legitimate is more productive of compliance than coercive power d) Digital surveillance produces more power than pre-digital surveillance because it produces more data

2. In Foucault's power/knowledge nexus, which of the following statements is most accurate?

a) Knowledge is a byproduct of power — those who have power gather knowledge for their own use b) Power and knowledge are co-constitutive: power requires knowledge to operate, and the exercise of power generates knowledge that extends power further c) In democratic societies, knowledge checks power by making surveillance subject to public scrutiny d) Knowledge production is independent of power; what matters is who controls the knowledge produced

3. Anthony Giddens identified surveillance as one of four institutional dimensions of modernity. Which of the following is NOT one of the other three he identified?

a) Capitalism b) Democracy c) Military power d) Industrialism

4. Giddens argues that the modern nation-state requires surveillance because:

a) Modern states face greater security threats than pre-modern states and need intelligence to respond b) Sovereign claims over a bounded territory and its entire population require the administrative capacity to know, count, classify, and manage that population c) Modern citizens expect transparency in government, and surveillance provides data that governments can share publicly d) Democratic systems require surveillance to prevent corruption and ensure accountability

5. David Lyon's "surveillance society thesis" claims that the primary harm of surveillance in modern societies is:

a) The violation of individual privacy through unauthorized data collection b) The psychological harm of living under a constant sense of being watched c) Social sorting — the classification and differential treatment of populations based on surveillance-generated data d) The concentration of surveillance power in state institutions at the expense of individual liberty

6. Shoshana Zuboff's concept of "behavioral surplus" refers to:

a) The extra behavioral monitoring that platforms conduct beyond what is necessary to provide their stated service b) The behavioral data produced by users that exceeds what is needed for service delivery and is extracted for use as a commercial commodity c) The surplus value created by workers' behavioral contributions to platform growth d) The behavioral modification achieved by surveillance capitalism beyond what advertising alone could accomplish

7. What does Zuboff mean by "instrumentarian power"?

a) The power of technical instruments to monitor and record human behavior with unprecedented precision b) The power exercised by using technical tools to enforce surveillance c) Power exercised not through coercion or normalization but through the modification of the behavioral environment — arranging conditions so that desired behaviors are more likely to occur d) The institutional power of technology companies to resist government surveillance regulation

8. Simone Browne's concept of "racializing surveillance" refers to:

a) Surveillance practices that explicitly use race as a classification variable b) The historical pattern in which Black people are surveilled more frequently than white people c) Surveillance practices whose definitions of normal, suspicious, or threatening are shaped by racial assumptions, and whose effects fall disproportionately on racialized populations d) The academic field of critical race theory applied to surveillance studies

9. Browne's concept of "dark sousveillance" describes:

a) The surveillance conducted by Black-owned institutions and community organizations to monitor their own communities b) Racialized resistance to surveillance through counter-visibility, opacity, and assertion of the right to be seen on one's own terms c) The surveillance of Black cultural and artistic production by state and commercial institutions d) The opacity of surveillance systems that makes them difficult to analyze from a critical race perspective

10. The Stoycheff (2016) study on social media self-censorship found that:

a) All users self-censored minority political opinions when aware of government surveillance b) Surveillance awareness had no effect on political expression on social media c) Only users who believed the government's surveillance was illegitimate self-censored their political opinions d) Users who believed the government's surveillance was legitimate were significantly more likely to self-censor minority political opinions

11. Which of the following is the strongest statement of Foucault's "technologies of the self" concept?

a) Self-surveillance practices (journaling, fitness tracking, self-assessment) are autonomous expressions of individual self-knowledge b) Technologies of the self are practices through which individuals work on themselves according to socially produced norms, often incorporating institutional surveillance frameworks into their own self-management c) Digital self-tracking apps are the modern equivalent of religious self-examination practices d) The self is constituted entirely by surveillance — individuals have no authentic interiority independent of institutional classification systems

12. Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" concept is relevant to surveillance studies because:

a) Most surveillance cameras are operated by men, making the gaze structurally masculine b) Surveillance of women's bodies in public space has historically been used to enforce patriarchal norms of behavior and appearance c) The structure of looking — the watcher's position as structurally masculine, the watched as structurally feminine — describes an asymmetric power relation that surveillance embodies d) Feminist scholars have shown that men's surveillance of women's online activity is more prevalent than any other form of domestic surveillance

13. Which of the following best describes the "unresolved tension" between Foucault's framework and critical race and feminist surveillance studies?

a) Foucault focused on European history while critical race and feminist scholars focus on American experience b) Foucault's framework sometimes implies subjects are wholly constituted by surveillance, while critical race and feminist frameworks insist on the possibility of counter-surveillance and resistance c) Foucault's framework is abstract and theoretical while critical race and feminist scholarship is empirical and concrete d) Critical race and feminist scholars reject Foucault's framework entirely as incompatible with their analysis of power

14. The Marthews and Tucker (2017) study of Google searches after the Snowden revelations found that:

a) Searches for terrorism-related terms increased after Snowden, as people sought information about what the NSA was monitoring b) Searches for terrorism-related terms decreased significantly in countries with strong civil liberties protections, suggesting surveillance awareness suppresses information-seeking c) The Snowden revelations had no significant effect on Google search behavior because most users believed they had nothing to hide d) Searches for privacy-related terms increased while searches for all other terms decreased proportionally

15. Which theoretical framework would be most useful for analyzing the situation described in the following scenario: A credit company uses a machine learning algorithm trained on historical data to determine loan eligibility, producing systematically different approval rates for neighborhoods that are racially homogeneous?

a) Foucault's panopticism b) Giddens' surveillance and the nation-state c) Zuboff's surveillance capitalism d) Lyon's social sorting / Browne's racializing surveillance

Part B: Short Answer (5 points each)

16. Foucault distinguishes between "repressive" power (which prohibits and punishes) and "productive" power (which creates, shapes, and enables). Using one specific example from surveillance studies, explain what productive power means in practice.

17. David Lyon argues that social sorting — not privacy violation — is the primary harm of surveillance in the surveillance society. Explain the distinction between a privacy harm and a social sorting harm, using one example of each.

18. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is different from previous capitalisms in kind, not just in degree. What makes it different? Use the concepts of "behavioral surplus" and "instrumentarian power" in your answer.

19. The chilling effect studies reviewed in Chapter 5 show that surveillance suppresses behavior among people who are not doing anything wrong and are not targeted by surveillance. Why is this finding politically significant — specifically, why does it challenge the "nothing to hide" defense of surveillance?

20. Browne traces "racializing surveillance" from the slave lantern law and slave pass system through contemporary biometric databases and predictive policing. What makes this a historical continuity rather than a mere resemblance? What does the continuity argument imply about the adequacy of technical fixes (better algorithms, fairer training data) as responses to discriminatory surveillance?

Answer Key Notes

Part A Answers: 1. b 2. b 3. b 4. b 5. c 6. b 7. c 8. c 9. b 10. d 11. b 12. c 13. b 14. b 15. d

Part B Guidance: - Question 16: Should identify a specific surveillance-produced subject, identity category, or classification — the "at-risk student," the "creditworthy borrower," the "suspicious person" — and explain how surveillance produces rather than merely identifies these categories - Question 17: Privacy harm involves violation of individual data protection norms; social sorting harm involves the classification and differential treatment of populations regardless of individual privacy - Question 18: Should address behavioral data as raw material, prediction products as the commodity, and instrumentarian power as operating through behavioral environment modification rather than coercion - Question 19: Should explain that "nothing to hide" assumes surveillance only affects wrongdoers; chilling effect shows it affects everyone, suppressing legitimate activity; democratic harm requires more than individual innocence - Question 20: Should distinguish continuity of social logic (not just resemblance) and note that technical fixes address the symptom (biased outputs) not the structural condition (surveillance organized around racial categories)

Chapter 5 | Part 1: Foundations | The Architecture of Surveillance