Leisure as Surveillance, and the Surveillance of Leisure

Introduction: Leisure in the surveillance society?
This special issue centralizes questions of leisure and “the problem(s)” of surveillance. While some leisure scholarship has focused on surveillance (Jordan & Aitchison, 2008; Rose & Spencer, 2016; Silk, Millington, Rich & Bush, 2016), we believe further attention is warranted, not least because of the incredible permeation and “deep mediatization” (Couldry & Hepp, 2020) of digital leisure in everyday life. This brief introductory article explores how leisure is a crucial node for the ascendance of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), and how the experience of leisure itself is changing as a result. While various forms of electronic surveillance have existed since the 1860s (Hochman, 2018), in the last quarter-century, with the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, mobile devices, and various “smart” technologies, the collection, cataloging, and monitoring of our everyday lives have become nearly ubiquitous (Agur & Frisch, 2019; Bauman, Bigo, Esteves, Guild, Jabri, Lyon & Walker, 2014; Crary, 2013; Fasman, 2021; Goodyear, Kerner & Quennerstedt, 2019; Price, 2014). Implications for leisure are numerous.