In Chapter 9, we look at how the pragmatician can capture the interactional dynamics of seemingly confusing cases of aggression in mediated political settings. In mediated scenes of politics, conflict may evolve in a seemingly ad hoc way, and in order to be able to analyse such settings it is necessary to linguistically analyse exactly what is happening in them. As a case study, we present a corpus of heckling incidents, including cases such as when the previous US first lady Michelle Obama was heckled in public. We argue that while heckling appears as a ‘disorderly’ incident, manifestations of heckling can be systematically categorised into major types, which impose different ritual frames on the public speaker being heckled. Following this view, our analysis shows that heckling is a standard situation in which the participants actually follow conventional forms of behaviour.

As I’ve intimated to at several turns but now fully confront, government surveillance is not the only threat to the privacy of marginalized communities. Privatized surveillance – by corporations and by other individuals – also exacts a heavy toll. Privatized surveillance has many lenses focused on many targets: employers at their employees, surveillance capitalists at consumers, and individuals at one another.1 Each instantiation of privatized surveillance renders us less legally protected from additional surveillance, both because it erodes the degree to which we have kept information “secret” ex ante (a precondition for legal privacy rights, as discussed in Chapter 1), and because the surveillance data itself is often used by other surveillers – the government and corporations.