YOU are at the mall. You see a security guard kick a suspected shoplifter. You are outraged, and without a moment鈥檚 thought whip out your mobile phone to record it. Congratulations, you鈥檝e just joined the sousveillance culture.
Is this about voyeurism? In a way, yes. Sousveillance is a French play on the word surveillance. Literally, it means 鈥渨atching from below鈥�, while all those surveillance cameras in shopping centres and railway stations watch you from above. Sousveillance is the democratic version of the surveillance culture: the watched are turning cameras on the watchers.
One of the first to use the term was Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, and co-author of Cyborg (Doubleday, 2002). Since the early 1980s, he has spent several hours each day wearing equipment that constantly records what he sees. For him, sousveillance involves 鈥渢he documenting of one鈥檚 own life from a more human perspective鈥�.
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Why would you want to do that? There are many reasons to conduct sousveillance: to hold authorities to account, to gather evidence for friends involved in confrontations with officials, to give people a sense of control over the constant oversight that takes place in many public places or to provide an alternative non-hierarchical neighbourhood-watch system. It is becoming increasingly popular, from the playful 鈥� taking random pictures of CCTV cameras 鈥� to the more serious, such as activists gathering footage for the grassroots media collective Indymedia ().
鈥淚t鈥檚 a democratic form of surveillance. The watched become the watchers鈥�
Sousveillance is now a ubiquitous phenomenon, but what made it so? The key was the development early this century of cheap digital imaging chips and memory that allowed anyone with a mobile phone with video to take part. A few minutes browsing on the hugely successful video-sharing website and its image-based cousin should convince you of the impact this technological development has had on popular culture. As with many revolutions in technology, the way people use it is a long way from what was envisaged (filming parties for their own amusement). It is a neat technological turnaround, too, since it was the development of cheap video recorders in the late 1980s that enabled authorities to keep a constant eye on the streets and other public places.
How do the watchers now like being watched? As many practitioners of sousveillance are finding out, the answer is not at all. Mann discovered this in 2002 when airport security staff forcibly removed his recording equipment. There are many cases of people having their camera seized when trying to photograph or video police or other security personnel. They had better get used to it. This may be the first time you鈥檝e heard the word, but sousveillance is here to stay.
