News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal: Research in relation to CW1

News of the World phone hacking scandal

In July 2011 one of the biggest tabloid giants News of the World was closed down after it was revealed several of it employees were excused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery and delegating improper influence in the pursuit of producing major stories. In the wake of this scandal investigations concluded that Celebrities, Royal Family members and Politicians had also been targeted in order to create new headlines. The decision to close down the News of the World was based on the revelation that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of killed soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 bombings were also targeted resulting in a public backlash against Rupert Murdoch.

The watchful eye of  journalists is another device used by news institutions to globally monitor and discipline our society.  Journalists along with their cameras follow the lead to headlines constantly chasing and invading the private lives of many people. Their constant surveillance amongst society shrinks privacy and creates a public platform producing identities to the masses. The surveillance of society is not only monitored and disciplined by cameras but also by phone hacking which invades private conversations and voicemails. The hacking of mobile phones is a type of power that compromises a whole set of techniques in order to create discipline over society. This type of surveillance is associated to a governance linking power back into a centralised body in order for our society to become regulated by an institution.

The phone hacking scandal brings light to our society with the kind of surveillance we are really dealing with in our every day lives Rheingold (2002 p186) comments,

'Although state sponsored surveillance and much commercially motivated data collection is conducted for the most part without the consent or knowledge of the surveillant , issues of privacy today are complicated by the voluntary adoption of technologies that disclose private information to others. How many mobile phone users know that they don't have to make a call for others to triangulate their location? They only need to switch on their device. Will users of mobile and pervasive technologies have the power to cloak, give away, or sell their personal data clouds - or to know who is inspecting them?  Rheingold (2002 p186)

The discipline of our nation by powerful groups has constrained the behavior of every civilian. The hacking and surveillance from tabloid institutions has complied with the status of the panoptic system. The inspecting gaze from the News of the World has maintained discipline creating control over the regulation of many identities. Rheingold (2002 p189-190) comments

' The emergence of surveillance and social control institutions marked a historical transition to a system of disciplinary power in which every movement is supervised and all events recorded. Disciplinary methods systematically isolated and neutralized 'the effects of counter power that spring from [an organised group] and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organisations, coalitions- anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.' For Foucault, the real danger was not necessarily that individuals are repressed by this form of social order but they are carefully fabricated in it.'  Rheingold (2002 p189-190)

Our society is fabricated by the surveillance of controlled institutions who maintain a discipline in order to create identities. The News of the World were an institution who created a movement designed to supervise and record relevant people within society in order to maintain control of the masses and become a governor of power.

Rheingold, H (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. United states of America : Basic Books. p186-190.