Title |
Tracing the smart virus in a smart city: a discursive analysis of Singapore's early pandemic surveillance response |
ID_Doc |
36401 |
Authors |
Lim, A |
Title |
Tracing the smart virus in a smart city: a discursive analysis of Singapore's early pandemic surveillance response |
Year |
2024 |
Published |
|
DOI |
10.1080/02723638.2024.2336840 |
Abstract |
What happened to the smart city's seductive promises of technological solutionism during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic? This paper traces the discursive circulation of the smart city in Singapore during the pandemic, based on a critical corpus-based analysis of 361 newspaper articles and 8 speeches from April to May 2020. Drawing from a discourse analysis, smart technological solutions were paired with a moral mandate of public health with little initial attention to privacy. The "smart" label creates a discursive path toward a technical frame, in which a smart virus is constructed to be necessarily solved by a smart solution. Further, the state legitimizes surveillance through a specific "will to combat," limiting other paths of causality and co-opting civil liberties into its surveillance mechanisms. Newer technologies and ever-growing data collection mechanisms require continued conversations about privacy and civil liberties both with and among key stakeholders. |
Author Keywords |
Smart city; discourse; surveillance; data; COVID-19 |
Index Keywords |
Index Keywords |
Document Type |
Other |
Open Access |
Open Access |
Source |
Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) |
EID |
WOS:001203567600001 |
WoS Category |
Geography; Urban Studies |
Research Area |
Geography; Urban Studies |
PDF |
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