surveillance vs. sousveillance

"Sousveillance"  is  a new word for me. I am surprised I missed it because at the  heart of my own thinking and practice is the idea of the returned gaze.  Sousveillance - in different words.


Surveillance, from the French for “watching over,” refers to the monitoring of people by some higher authority — the police, for instance. Now there’s sousveillance, or “watching from below.” It refers to the reverse tactic: the monitoring of authorities (Tony Blair, for instance) by informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant against the excesses of the powers that be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3b.t-3.html

 My own rethink of colonialism and photography  and its influence top down Documentary  Photography is what led me to look at how a right to self representation was at the heart of photography in small studios all over India.  The top down documentary gaze was challenged in these spaces as people took control of their own representations.

In a new omniopticon world where newer surveillance technologies are creating totalitarian states with immense panoptcicon power over people, the idea of oppositional Sousveillance  is taking on a new and  increasing  importance . This is the time to shoot back. To talk back. To retake  and reclaim  the right to not just self representation but the right to  fight back against  top down power of Big Brother Surveillance  societies.

This review points to a book I just have to read.

Seeing how democratic societies have given up their rights and their freedom, Mattelart examines the genealogy of surveillance techniques from the 19th century to the Patriot Act, from “finger-printing as a method of forgery-proof identification” to the rise of worldwide identification and tracking systems that are slowly transforming citizens into “socio-political suspects” and victims of a predatory consumerist economy. The book becomes an eye-opener to societies and the individual to become alert to the continuous dangers posed by sophisticated systems of surveillance.

In a globalised world, the coming together of policing and marketing has the inherent agenda of controlling public opinion in the name of national security: “In every instance, the logic of suspicion has reaped immediate dividends from fear and left a lasting punitive stamp on ‘normal’ procedures.” This almost blinds us to the gradual diminishing of our individual right to free speech. Security, surveillance and suspicion together build systems that gradually increase their power of control.

The globalising dynamics of such ubiquitous shadowing of our every move has resulted in “escalating military and police repression”. “Mounting security concerns have been met with mounting technological response.” It is a world ridden with “tensions between security and freedom, secrecy and transparency, constraint and consent, and subjection and resistance”. Democratic structures along with their foremost tenet of fundamental liberties stand eroded in the face of unbridled free market economics that exists only “to control every facet of life”, a system of the “Panopticon” visualised by Jeremy Benthem in the early 18th century as an architectural construction where the warden in a central tower can observe the prisoners in their cells without the prisoners seeing the warden.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20121005291909000.htm

Politicians are increasingly monitored by citizen-videos, a practice that allows citizens to bypass the mainstream press and present their own unvarnished accounts of campaign activities. The most famous example may be the videotape of George Allen, the GOP candidate for Senate in 2004, who had the bad judgment to utter an ethnic slur, maccaca. The sousveillance video arguably tipped the election in favor of Allen’s opponent, James Webb. The British newspaper, The Guardian, once enlisted its readers to help take photos of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair at a time when the Labour Party was trying to insulate him from press coverage.

The fascinating thing about sousveillance is how people with power – whether policemen, politicians or corporate officials – get supremely agitated at the idea that anyone would try to photograph, tape or videotape them. They find sousveillance quite threatening. For good reason: their behaviors can now be held to public account. The very possibility that official behaviors might be documented and publicized is unsettling to those who have previously enjoyed an unchallenged right of top-down surveillance against us.

http://onthecommons.org/using-sousveillance-defend-commons