Here's a term you may not have heard before. Sousveillance is the inverse of surveillance. It refers to the increasing ability of ordinary individual citizens to use technology to record and monitor those who have institutional power. People with cell phone cameras or wearable recorders can film and record activities such as police brutality and the recordings can then be broadcast on the Internet or shared with news agencies to raise public awareness, or with the authorities, and could even be used in court. A student might record a professor's sexual harrassment and then expose them to the authorities, for example. Workers can film their managers abusing power and then take the evidence to a higher authority.
Forms of sousveillance have greatly undermined the power of corporate mass media and governments to be the gatekeeper's of the news. Tufekci (2017) discusses how Turkish government censorship of the mainstream media was circumvented once half the population of the country was online and had smartphones. Other countries, such as China, have been more aware of the power of social media and now control and censor the Internet fairly severely. But as long as there are freer communities elsewhere and satellite network connections the possibility of getting the truth out to the world remains.
Hackers sometimes provide a kind of sousveillance equivalent of dataveillance, breaking into the computer systems of companies and the government and exposing their misdeeds.
Sousveillance is generally performed by ordinary individuals or groups.
Finally, there is social surveillance (see Marwick 2012 for more in-depth analysis).
Social surveiillance is made possible by our voluntary and knowing sharing of information and media through social media, either with a select group of followers or in a way that is entirely open to the public at large. Others have called this, perhaps more accurately, participatory surveillance, because it is we who make possible the ability for others to monitor us through our presence online.
Social surveillance is generally performed by our friends, our extended “friend” networks, our families, and at times by strangers ("stalkers," or other interested parties, for example people who feel they are competing with us, or potential employers).
This is the latest brand of surveillance, and deserves a bit closer consideration. Alice Marwick suggests that it differs from traditional surveillance in three key ways:
In other words, unlike the model in which governments or corporations or other powerful entities invade our privacy for their own nefarious ends, in our current global village individuals are both surveilled by and monitor one another and the power of knowledge is dispersed in the interactivity of our free-flowing mutual surveillance.
Perhaps all this public-ness of what used to be private is even in our favour (as we can clearly see is the case with sousveillance) - or perhaps it provides more "checks and balances" so that power is not really centralized the way it was when technology was exclusively in the hands of the elite. Whether we want to take responsibility or not, the possibility of surveilling us in this way is largely our own free choice (or at least not one enforced by powerful institutions). The pressure comes from society itself and the norms of social media.
Needless to say, not everyone appreciates that pressure. As student Alexander di Corpo, who took this class in 2018, put it: "It's kind of like a reverse panopticon; you are in the middle but can't see who's on the outside."
Let's end the lesson by taking a deeper dive into some of the positives and negatives of social or participatory surveillance. Is it a better or a worse panopticon, or is it just different?
Kietzmann and Angell raised an alarming spectre at the end of their article when they called attention to how we are now monitoring each other in our connected society. This is a definite advance on the panopticon: "The computing power of spy technology has been placed in the hands of private citizens" (Kietzmann and Angell, 137). Seemingly this should be reassuring - power to the people! sousveillance of "the man"! - but not everyone is comforted.
Kietzmann and Angell were concerned that the public may be enlisted to police itself in ways that are ultimately oppressive. The original panopticon had an element of this: each prisoner can see across to a majority of prisoners in the other cells, and a prisoner may himself call out an illicit activity being performed by a rival prisoner. Each prisoner has to fear the gaze of his fellow inmates along with the possible guard behind the screen up in the tower. Certainly this kind of surveillance was part of the nightmare world of 1984, where you had the paranoid certainty that your fellow citizens were also watching, and might betray you to Big Brother even if Big Brother himself was not watching at the moment. "The ultimate public panopticon," Kietzmann and Angell argue,
can be achieved by convincing the population to spy on itself. When live CCTV feeds become tied to geospatial applications on the Internet (such as Google Maps' highly detailed Street View feature), the elderly will no longer spy only on their local neighborhoods from behind lace curtains, they will be able to watch a much wider area online. (137)
The authors imagine a future in which everyone is a potential busybody and the authorities pay citizens to inform on each other. I will leave it up to you to decide how far-fetched or paranoid their fantasies actually are:
Think what could happen if people were paid to report any anti-social behavior they saw and recorded? Next, add a Global Positioning System to each mobile phone - this will soon be a legal requirement in Japan. Now suppose the longitude and latitude can be superimposed on any digital photograph along with a tamper proof time signal. Add on a checksum and digital certificate that guarantees the image has not been altered with the likes of Photoshop, include the above-mentioned facial recognition features, and finally invite such images to be submitted as evidence in a court of law. By instantaneously e-mailing such a certified photograph (or video) from the mobile phone to the authorities of say anyone being illegally parked, the photographer could be paid a bounty, a flat amount or a percentage of the penalty to encourage catching offenders. Such practices are strongly reminiscent of the Spitzels of the former German Democratic Republic and of civil informants in China today or indeed the Wanted: Dead or Alive posters from the Wild West. The difference now is that the state can pay rewards directly and anonymously into the telephone account, and have the mobile phone payment system changed, allowing credit on an account to be withdrawn at post-offices [this is true in the United Kingdom, where the authors live]. No more traffic wardens - we're all Stasi now! (138)
The Stasi, as mentioned earlier, were the state secret police in the former East Germany. A significant percentage of the population, perhaps half a million people or more, were employed by the secret police as informers! Kietzmann and Angell worry about a future in which we are spying on each other constantly - whether as remunerated stoolies, do-gooder citizens, or casual users of Facebook and other social media services into which corporations and government agencies can tap. In this future, they suggest,
every honest citizen has become criminalized, with society itself as the prison, and each prisoner doubling up as a potential guard and bounty hunter. The state doesn't need to pay salaries to the jailers; it's all pay-by-results spying and sanctimonious reporting. At last, the ultimate panopticon, and it's coming soon to a neighborhood near you. (138)
Despite how much most people complain about privacy, it is questionable how important it really is to the average 21st century person. Bradley Meyer, who took this course in 2014, suggested that worries about having our privacy invaded by strangers are misguided. Perhaps we have inherited them from the 20th century, in which we feared Big Brother would end up watching us always, and the Panopticon was a nightmare scenario of a world without privacy. In the 21st century, Big Brother became a reality TV show, everyone wants their "15 minutes of fame," and people may be rapidly losing their (print culture?) attachment to privacy in the new global village. The means of surveillance have been distributed to the vast majority of the population in the developed world. We are all (on) Big Brother now, and most of us seem to want to be there.
In his discussion forum post on surveillance Meyer quoted a passage from David Brin's 1990 science fiction novel, Earth, a book that paints a future world in which privacy is a thing of the past:
When I overheard you guys dreaming aloud of privacy ... that took me back ... People used to talk like that back at the end of TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam ... The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech ... and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful ... or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else, including snooping the government! (Brin, 115)
Privacy was one of the central principles of the humanist world view of the last 500 years, and a cornerstone - especially in the form of private property - of Liberal Democracy. But perhaps in McLuhan's global village the value of privacy has greatly diminished. Many of us are addicted now to a form of self-promotion and virtual "out-there-ness" that I like to call - intending the ironic commericial undertones - "publicity." Many people now speak of developing their "brand" as though they were products or a corporation, an attitude that would have seemed dehumanizing and phoney in my own young adult days.