Philip E. Agre

Philip E. Agre is a former associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His new media writing includes the essay, Surveillance and Capture. He was successively the publisher of The Network Observer (TNO) and The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). TNO ran from January 1994 until July 1996. RRE, an influential mailing list he started in the mid-1990s, ran for around a decade. A mix of news, Internet policy and politics, RRE served as a model for many of today's political blogs and online newsletters.

Prior to his teaching position at UCLA, Agre held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (now the School of Informatics) at the University of Sussex and the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 1989.

Agre went missing on October 16, 2009, but was found in good health on January 16, 2010.

Agre's essay Surveillance and Capture deals with privacy and surveillance issues made possible by our constantly evolving technological age. Influential works preceding this essay include George Orwell's 1984, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Constituents of a Theory of the Media, and Michel Foucault's works surrounding the concept of panopticism. Foucault argues that a constant exercise of such surveillance is not necessary, since its mere possibility induces self-restrained action among the inmates.

On October 16, 2009, Agre's sister filed a missing persons report for Agre. She indicated that she had not seen him since the Spring of 2008 and became concerned when she learned that he had abandoned his apartment and job sometime between December 2008 and May 2009. Agre was found by the LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010, and was deemed in good health and self-sufficient.

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