IMAGINE a world where anyone, anywhere, armed with just an average PC and a fast modem, could decide to drop in and do a bit of electronic snooping on you. Imagine they could switch on the video camera in the corner of the room and download images on you idly picking your nose. Or imagine they could turn on a microphone while you whisper into the telephone, or grab the very words you are writing on your computer screen.
Well, actually, forget about the imagining bit. This kind of thing is already beginning to happen on the Internet. And the irony for those worried about surveillance by Big Brother is that people are scrambling to expose themselves to the global gaze. Internet users have been spending their own time and money to mount video cameras in their studies or offices, and even in public places, then feeding the view down the line to anyone who wants to gawk.
Far from disliking being on display, Net users have been constantly seeking new ways to exhibit themselves. One of the latest wrinkles is a simple program written by a group of college kids in the US which broadcasts whatever happens to be on their computer screens at the moment. Click on the tagline “What’s Anthony up to?” and you can join the hundreds of others who have peered over the shoulder of Anthony Sciola at Brown University since he and three of his friends went live with the utility in April.
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Closet exhibitionist
Then there is Reiko Chiba, a 19-year-old Japanese pop star, who is turning her home into a TV studio complete with chromakey blue walls to allow the background projection of digital special effects. Chiba says she wants to be the first virtual persona and uses the Internet to allow fans to peek in her wardrobe and vote on the clothes she will wear that day.
However, attaching the family camcorder to the Internet is still the simplest and most popular method of self-exposure. A random trawl through recent camera listings on the World Wide Web brings up the view of the Pyrenees from someone’s backyard, Adam Curry’s home office, Room 100 at Buckman Elementary School, and a security camera image of the reception desk at SBT Accounting Systems in San Rafael, California. Sadly, the most eye-catching listing looks to be a spoof – or just hard to access. It promises: “See if we give a shit – check out what’s happening with WPS’s toilet …”
At the moment, this outbreak of global snooping seems to be just good, clean fun for computer science types in places like California. Most of the cameras are stationary and pointed at pretty boring things – usually the view of the back of someone’s head, sat at a desk. Because of the cost of transmission, the cameras tend to send out single frames, a snapshot picture refreshed every few minutes or so. And the images are low-resolution black and white, with no sound.
But with the price of modems and computers falling fast, this primitive state of affairs will not last long. Already there are several cameras broadcasting live video-audio feeds. There are a few installations which allow users to swivel the cameras around, and zoom in. And in a year or so, colour, TV-quality images should be commonplace.
So what will happen once Net users begin to shed their inhibitions, mounting cameras in places other than the study? Or when they turn their lenses and mikes on unsuspecting neighbours or friends to the titillation of teenagers from Iceland to Idaho? Is voyeur-vision destined to be the mass entertainment of the future – cheap thrills to fill the coming glut of cable bandwidth?
Given the fact that the future usually defeats all attempts to imagine it, perhaps the more important question is will anyone mind? Where exactly do we want to draw the line when it comes to electronic surveillance?
Camcorders plugged into the Internet are just the tip of the very large iceberg. Today, as we drive down motorways, walk through city centres, or wander through shops, we are moving from one cone of surveillance to another. Closed-circuit security systems have taken over public spaces.
Then there is dataveillance. Computer databases maintained by government departments and marketing organisations are stuffed full of intimate details about us. Our credit cards cast a long electronic shadow, giving away the most detailed information about our movements and personal tastes. Then, if someone is really interested in us, there is heavy-duty technology such as police helicopters with high-definition, infrared cameras, hovering over the city skyline.
Isn’t this the very world Orwell was trying to warn us about? Yet when asked about the every-increasing level of surveillance, most people say they find the high-street cameras oddly reassuring. The only thing annoying about police helicopters is the racket they make – at least infrared scopes mean they don’t need to disturb us with the glare of searchlights any more.
Surveillance, and people’s rather unpredictable reactions to it, dominated conversations at Technophobia, a conference held recently by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to talk about the cultural impact of technology.
Philip Tabor, a computer-aided design expert at the architect school of University College London, said the issues were already affecting his everyday life. A recent spate of burglaries near his home in Camden, in inner London, has prompted his local residents’ association to seek quotes for installing a private video camera system to monitor the street. The idea of bugging the road did not appear to trouble anyone too much.
But Tabor also reported how he had gone white with anger when he discovered that one of his students had rigged up an eavesdropping device in the college’s toilets. “There were mutterings about me infringing people’s liberty to do interesting research, but I thought bugging the staff toilets was not on, even as a joke.”
Other speakers at Technophobia were equally ambivalent about the idea of surveillance. Kevin Robins, a reader in cultural geography at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, said that he knew he should object to the kind of public space monitoring that is now routine in airports, city centres and shopping malls. Yet, like many others, the unseen eye of electronic surveillance generally made him feel safer. A human security guard standing sternly by the door in Marks & Spencer always trigged a discomforting spasm of guilt and seemed overly intrusive. But knowing that high-definition cameras were tracking his movements within the shop, and that they would automatically zero in on tills ringing up purchases of between £42 and £50 – seeking criminals taking advantage of the £50 cheque guarantee limit on stolen cards – left him unmoved.
So how do we decide where to draw the line? Robins says the problem is that the moral debate has failed to keep pace with what technology is making possible. The opinion formers of popular culture have become trapped in a binary flip-flop between dread and fascination – between the technophobic visions of Orwell’s novel, 1984, and the cyberphilic possibilities afforded by video games, the Internet and slacker culture. Robins complains that there seems to be no language to describe a balanced, in-between position.
It is easy to determine the extremes of abuse: few want to see the overtly coercive or harmful use of electronic monitoring. But the moral dilemma lies in knowing precisely when surveillance crosses the line. What tips the balance – people at the conference and generally seem to agree – is the feeling of intrusion. Or more precisely, the feeling that the electronic-mediated gaze was starting to threaten a person’s ability to control the soical face he or she wanted to present to the world.
Playing by the rules
One of our biggest fears in life is social embarrassment – of being caught literally, or metaphorically, with our trousers down. As sociologists note, we live our lives putting on the front appropriate to the occasion. Strict rules of conduct apply in every situation, whether we are playing at being the good employee, the honest shopper or the enthusiastic lover.
We will go to amazing lengths to maintain these facades. A favourite example quoted by sociologists are the suicides who write several drafts of their final note in an attempt to strike exactly the right chord with those they leave behind.
There is a script to follow even in doing away with yourself – and suicide without the appropriate display can cause a perverse kind of annoyance in others.
There is no escape from the need to maintain a social front even in being “antisocial”. Acting out the role of a punk, a Hell’s Angel, or any of the hundred other rebellious poses made available to us by the inventiveness of modern culture, places even tighter restrictions on our behaviour. Caught at the right moment, a skinhead is as likely to be as warm, caring and sharing a human being as the rest of us. But in most social situations, the pressure will be on skinheads to live up to their image. The opportunities for them to let their guard down, to act soft and sweet if they feel like it, will be few.
As far as the threat of surveillance goes, the point is that it is not being watched that we mind. Indeed, the idea of being the object of global fascination – of being a Madonna or an Agassi tracked by a million pairs of eyes – is one of the driving fantasies of modern life. But what we want is to remain in control of the way we present ourselves. We don’t want the cameras rolling as we slop pizza down our shirts, tread clumsily on the cat, or buy piles ointment at the chemist.
Of course, the question can be turned on its head to ask exactly what is it that makes electronic surveillance socially justified? What do we need surveillance anyway?
The obvious answer is that the reason we want to watch other people is to make sure they conform to the roles that society has laid down for them. Surveillance is something that has always existed. In tribal cultures, where every person in a camp can see and hear just about everything going on, and also knows precisely how custom dictates people should be behaving, the level of social surveillance is intense.
Even away from the prying eyes of the camp, tribe members carry around with them the idea of vengeful gods. The anthropological explanation of religion, with its ever-watchful spirits, is that it was an early social invention designed to keep the behaviour of unobserved individuals in check. Although our belief in judgmental gods has weakened, every society still aims to instil some kind of moral code in its members.
As children, people are taught to internalise the prevailing morality so that acting against society prompts feelings of guilt. So throughout most of history, the individual has been tightly bound by both actual and imagined surveillance. Now, with the anonymity that comes with crowded city living, is society having to find ways to reintroduce a stabilising measure of surveillance trhough technological means?
One of the problems with electronic surveillance is the uncertainty and abruptness with which we fall under its beady eye. In many situations, we would not mind its presence so long as we were granted warning of its arrival. We simply want enough time to adjust our social presentation – to remove our finger from our nose, bail out of a game of Flight Simulator and assume the required look of earnest concentration.
Virtual designers
At Tabor’s architectural classes, students have been working with some of the latest office technology. These new systems use closed-circuit TV to allow designers in different buildings, and even different continents, to work as if they sat at adjacent desks. At UCL, students have created virtual design teams with colleagues as far away as Japan.
Researchers at places like Xerox’s EuroParc in Cambridge (“Don’t forget your memory aide”, żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 5 February 1994) have had to give much thought to how to minimise the intrusiveness of such forms of communication. At EuroParc, when a user switches on a camera to glance into another’s room, the act is preceded by the synthesised sound of a creaking door and the announcement of the person’s name. This gives a split second’s warning, just as if the person were poking a head around a real door.
Understanding the psychology of what people feel about surveillance technology is going to be crucial to the designers and regulators of a wired society. On a broad level, the evidence is that people want the kind of surveillance which allows them to exert a healthy social pressure on their peers. There will be support for systems that help re-establish a lost sense of community in the public sphere. The reverse side of the coin is that people will be surprisingly tolerant of almost any level of surveillance, so long as they don’t feel the technology is going to expose them to public ridicule or humiliation.
But the future may not hold what people really want. Already local residents’ associations are switching on the TV cameras. How long will it be before bright young sparks realise that hooking their street to the Internet creates a free monitoring service? No need to worry about changing the tapes when thousands of anoraks are tuning in, searching cyberspace for a bit of vicarious excitement. Then someone will start up a comment page where Net-cruisers speculate about which neighbour is having an affair with whom, and arguing about the nature of the mysterious, late-night deliveries to number twelve.
Recreational surveillance is already a pastime for the many who have bought short-wave scanners to eavesdrop on police radios and cellular phone conversations – a comparatively dull form of entertainment, even given the occasional chance encounter with a philandering member of the Royal Family. So forget Big Brother. He will certainly be around, watching your speed on the roads, taking pictures of you at football matches and keeping track of you through your credit card spending. But it could be the smirking, giggling Kid Brother who really ends up bugging you.