In The New Yorker, Maria Bustillos talks about the ubiquity of non-government surveillance:
… the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us. This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices. (As I learned after publishing this, the term had been coined earlier, and Cory Doctorow used it in 2007 for his book of the same name.)
The era of Little Brother was perhaps inaugurated in November, 1963, with the Kodachrome II 8-mm. film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination inadvertently captured by the Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. George Holliday’s videotape of the March, 1991, beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and Scott Prouty’s forty-seven-per-cent video, which arguably cost Mitt Romney the Presidency last year, fall into the same class.
There is a surprisingly rich and dynamic academic literature developing around the concept of “sousveillance,” a term coined by the University of Toronto professor and inventor Steve Mann to describe privately made recordings that can serve as a counterweight to institutional and government surveillance. Mann is famous for approaching these questions from the perspective of wearable computing, a field in which he is one of the earliest pioneers; his apparent eccentricity is belied by the gravity and lucidity of his writing, which is heavily influenced by Foucault’s views on panopticism:
One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch.
Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism,” a term invented by Mann (1998) for a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: “Do you like what you see?” If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered.
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
