Overview
The capture model is Agre's alternative framework for understanding how information technology enables monitoring and control. In his 1994 paper "Surveillance and Capture," Agre argued that the dominant metaphor for understanding technology-mediated monitoring — the visual metaphor of surveillance, drawn from Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon — was inadequate for understanding how computers actually track human activity.
Where the surveillance model is based on visual observation of people in physical spaces, the capture model is based on the restructuring of activities so they leave digital traces. Capture works by imposing "grammars of action" — formal representations of activity — onto human practices that were previously informal or ambiguous. Once an activity has been captured in a grammar, it can be tracked, analyzed, and reorganized computationally.
Key Distinction from Surveillance
The critical distinction is that capture doesn't require watching — it requires reorganization. A supermarket doesn't need cameras to know what you buy; it needs you to use a loyalty card that imposes a grammar on the previously untracked activity of shopping. The grammar turns browsing-and-buying into a sequence of scannable, storable, analyzable events.
Significance
The capture model anticipated the dominant form of digital monitoring by decades. What we now call "data collection" or "behavioral tracking" operates almost entirely through capture rather than surveillance — through the imposition of grammars on activities like searching, socializing, moving, and purchasing. Agre saw this clearly in 1994, well before the commercial internet made it ubiquitous.