Surveillance through Social Networks along the US-Mexico Border

‘The Texas Border’ and ‘AZ: move and get shot’, are two net based artworks which explore the phenomenon of surveillance on the internet carried out by civilians on the border between Mexico and the US. Many of these online platforms appeared during the rise of the social networking service and its structure was adopted as a cheaper and more efficient alternative way to monitor the border by offloading the state’s responsibilities to secure the territory to the citizens by means of crowdsourcing. In this article I will try to argue how this monitoring activity, when combined with interactive media, turns into a tool to decontextualise the border and crowdsource the police actions to civilians, and by extension, turn the users into disengaged border officers.