It was really interesting to read about Manovich’s insights about the duality of augmented reality and the surveillance that is necessary to populate it with data. As the original essay was originally written in 2002, the author could only see surveillance creeping in in very specific cases - video camera footage, cellphone conversation interception and some other examples. Nowadays, there are many times more examples of this surveillance.

In addition, what Manovich calls “surveillance” isn’t necessarily only that when looked at in contemporary context. By that he refers to third parties collecting information that is necessary to provide their services/information to their clients through augmented reality objects and while traditional surveillance is a big part of this, I think the use of the word ‘surveillance’ does not account for a much bigger part of information sharing - information that we voluntarily choose to share in various kinds of social networks: our employment information on LinkedIn, our location information on Foursquare, our life events on Facebook. This is concerning because by actively using augmented reality in architecture as well as personal lives, we both as a society and as an individual implicitly consent to our information being used this way. We care very little about the safeguards when sharing this information, and we probably will for a long time in the future. Augmented reality is just so useful and compelling.