Gunshots or Fireworks? Tracing the Spatial Diffusion of Digital Participatory Surveillance

The proliferation of consumer surveillance technologies and hyperlocal social media platforms reflects a broad sociotechnical shift in the ways ordinary citizens maintain community safety through their participatory surveillance. Recent qualitative research suggests that platform-based surveillance amplifies perceived neighborhood threat as residents adopt these tools to maintain urban order. How are these digital tools proliferating so rapidly despite historic declines in crime? To address this question, this article investigates the spatiotemporal diffusion of participatory surveillance across urban neighborhoods using dynamic spatial Durbin models with neighborhood and temporal fixed effects. The results show that participatory surveillance spreads through a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which surveillance activity clusters over time and propagates outward from early hotspots. These spatiotemporal patterns are consistent with a conceptual framework in which digital technologies localize a risk society by anchoring a diffuse sense of insecurity onto local spaces and legitimizing further informal social control. These findings have implications for understanding how surveillance technologies reshape perceptions of neighborhood disorder and reproduce urban inequality.