During the modern era the significance of new media technologies, from the press and the telephone to the Internet and smartphones, has regularly been associated with broadened horizons and increased connectivity between people. The role of the media for sustaining social control and surveillance has not been foregrounded to the same extent, partly because technologies of surveillance have not been considered as proper "media" (at least not from an institutional perspective). In relation to the media technological developments of the last decades, including such phenomena as convergence and interactivity, however, surveillance aspects have become increasingly prominent. Various types of economic and social mapping occur continuously, and interactively, via online practices on behalf of institutions and corporations. At the same time media users themselves are given the tools for monitoring each other. The limits as to what is "surveillance" and what is not are increasingly blurred, giving rise to more liquid social conditions. Oftentimes, the individual freedom to move and act, socially and geographically, is paired with increased control at the structural level. Private media technologies (such as mobile phones) offer increased security, whereas the everyday saturation of surveillance processes becomes a potential source of social insecurity and anxiety.

This media enforced ambivalence between freedom/security and control/insecurity has been the point of departure of the Secure Spaces project. The aim has been to map out and gain a deeper understanding of how people today (in the context of Sweden) appropriate and use various media for security related (vs other) purposes, and clarify how these patterns and experiences are related to social structures in society. The following five questions have been studied: (1) To what extent are increased social security and control motivations for the consumption of new private media among different social groups? (2) What are the attitudes to the expansion of mediated surveillance in society among different groups? (3) How is the ambivalence between freedom/security vs control/insecurity experienced and negotiated through everyday practices? (4) How are various media applied within the socio-cultural "boundary work" of everyday life, that is, for inclusion vs. exclusion? (5) In what ways do the expansion of private and public "security media" contribute to the negotiation of social power geometries, dependencies and ideologies?

The questions have been analyzed through a national survey (Society Opinion Media 2010), which included questions about experienced privacy threats related with different media technologies, and through 40 qualitative interviews conducted during 2009-2011 in diverse social contexts: (a) locally rooted inhabitants of two Swedish small-towns, (b) Turkish speaking migrant communities in the greater Stockholm area, and (c) globally mobile inner city-dwellers in Stockholm.

The project has been carried out according to the project-plan. Professor Miyase Christensen and professor André Jansson have been the principal investigators. PhD James Pamment and BA David Kvicklund have assisted in the data collection (qualitative interviews).

CONCLUSIONS

1. The project has shown that interpersonal forms of surveillance/control, for example via camera-phones and webcams in combination with social media, are generally perceived as causing privacy threats to a greater extent than surveillance forms that are institutionally sanctioned (e.g., public camera surveillance and electronic transactions). However, perceptions vary according to factors such as age, education, ideological orientation and media habits. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative data a more fine-grained picture has been presented along with the concepts of "interveillance" and "complicit surveillance". These concepts grasp the social condition through which horizontal monitoring practices and new forms of reflexivity get naturalized as part of everyday life, online as well as offline, and how these practices, in turn, interweave with social needs, such as expressivity and recognition, that legitimate structural forms of surveillance (notably for commercial purposes).

2. The qualitative studies have demonstrated how the handling of private information, about oneself and others, tend to follow moral norms and cultural conventions related to social positioning and belonging. The maintenance of boundaries between private and public realms, such as the extent to which one is willing to expose oneself through the "life online", is in certain social settings a matter of cultural distinction and positioning, whereas in other settings it may depend more on deeply rooted moral convictions (expressed in terms of "common sense"). A general pattern, still, holds that privacy related problems are mostly associated with Others (especially young people), rather than with oneself. Thus, the affordances of new media for "seeing and being seen" are key to the maintenance of sociocultural and moral boundaries in society.

3. At a broader theoretical level the project has contributed to more nuanced insights regarding mediatization as a meta-process of modern society. Whereas the social and cultural saturation of media, and the accentuated dependence on increasingly differentiated and "indispensable" media technologies, alter life conditions for people in general, the social consequences hereof are contradictory - alternating between the encapsulating logics of surveillance society and more cosmopolitan processes (cosmopolitanization). The project has shown how the relations between these forces are negotiated in various social contexts depending on material and symbolic resources.

Epistemologically, the Secure Spaces project has contributed significantly to the introduction of a more contextualized view of the social dynamics of surveillance society - not least a deeper understanding of how the very phenomenon of "surveillance", in relation to an increasingly complex media landscape, gets negotiated in concrete settings of everyday life. Still, there are limits as to what type of information can be gathered through interviews. Our studies indicate that research would also benefit from going deeper into the individual considerations directly related to media practices. For example, there is still a need to deepen our knowledge about the "privacy paradox", that is, the inclination of social subjects to comply with surveillance and various forms of exposure in spite of their moral and/or ideological conviction of acting differently.

PUBLICATION STRATEGY AND INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS

The project has been involved in international networks in complementary ways. Firstly, the principal investigators (Christensen and Jansson) has initiated and participated in a number of conference panels on global level (e.g., ICA, IAMCR), European level (e.g., ECREA) and Nordic level (NordMedia, MigraNord) - see also publication list. Secondly, the project and its collaborators have been part of the European COST Action network Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS/COST Action 0807: http://www.liss-cost.eu), which has included conferences, working group meetings and the production of joint publications. Thirdly, the project has collaborated with international researchers within two two book projects led by Christensen and Jansson; the edited volumes Online Territories: Globalization, Mediated Practice and Social Space (Peter Lang, 2011) and Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2013). The project has also resulted in four peer-reviewed articles in international journals, as well as popular articles nationally and internationally. A significant share of the publications, especially journal articles, is available through online databases.

The above-mentioned books are the project's most significant publications:

1. Online Territories (14 chapters) was initiated at the early stage of the project and was important for establishing the media sociological theoretical framework. Several prominent international scholars were invited to discuss and analyze issues of "online" vs. "offline" social practices, focusing on the reproduction and challenging of old and new power dimensions and demarcations - thus the focus on "territory". The chapters by Christensen and Jansson, respectively, introduce empirically grounded accounts of "complicit surveillance" (Christensen) and "encapsulations" (Jansson). The book also emanated from two symposia organized within the RJ funded Karlstad Media and Community Research Group (also including Christian Christensen).

2. Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspectives (12 chapters) will be published in 2013 and constitutes the final report from the Secure Spaces project. The book pinpoints the ways in which social perspectives can contribute to further our understandings of surveillance societies, and does so concretely through a number of empirically grounded contributions. Christensen's and Jansson's chapters make use of significant parts of the fieldwork. Christensen's analyses make use of interview data from inner city Stockholm, addressing questions of how individuals in urban settings cope with the omnipresence of various forms of monitoring and control (through routinized forms of complicity and/or resistance). Jansson highlights the processes of moral legitimation involved in the appropriation of private media technologies and monitoring devices in locally rooted small-town households.

The richness of the empirical material has also made it possible to discuss overarching (meta-)processes in society, notably mediatization. To provide this broader picture the material has sometimes been related to empirical material gathered through parallel projects. Thus, different synergies have been reached.