Today, as the T took me from the edge of the city to the edge of the suburbs, I quit reading about The Simulation of Surveillance and visually loafed with the cityscape. Even as I passed through, no matter the train’s speed, Allston/Brighton kept still.

The snow had that effect. All morning, sticky flakes came down; by the time that I took my ride to campus, those flakes aligned themselves and produced a layer of Winter over the apartments and parked cars and skeletons of trees.

Typically, these T rides are harrowing. Cars & pedestrians test the patience of overworked conductors; in response, the conductors work the train’s horn into a nasty howl. And the rest of us, with our fragile Boston-pedestrian psyches, suffer.

But today, with the snow turning the surface of the city into a Polaroid of itself, with the hustle buried, the ride kept calm and quiet.

Thing is, from behind the window of the train, I recalled the logic of Robert D. Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom & Dream.

In the seventeenth century Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for a change in consciousness which began approximately in the fifteenth century with the artistic invention of linear perspective drawing. Linear perspective drawing is a technique for representing three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane which imagines the self to be a spectator behind a window who takes the world’s measure with the eye and with the eye alone. Keeping an eye upon the world, the spectator now makes sense of the world as a spectacle for observation, measurement, and calculation. Quantity now eclipses quality as the world becomes increasingly mapped by the equations of mathematics.

Moreover, compared with other senses like touch, taste, or smell, the eye favors distance over intimacy. The spectator behind the window, therefore, begins to lose touch with the world and is increasingly unmoved by it. In fact, the body’s sensuous entanglements with the world become an obstacle to this vision which favors neutrality and detachment. Thus the animate body, like the natural world which now matters only as a spectacle, now matters only as a specimen. For the spectator on the other side of the window, this specimen body is well on its way to becoming an anatomical object on the dissecting table.

Behind the window, I enjoyed the vision but kept remembering how goddamn awful it was to trudge through the slush to go grocery shopping earlier in the day. The walk took nearly twice as long as it usually does, mainly because I had to dodge and jump cold puddles and wet snow. I got home with wet socks, wet pants, cursing myself for not remembering to wear boots.

It’s a different kind of relationship, a different kind of knowledge, but even on days like today, even when the world gets hostile, I wouldn’t trade those sopping socks for the T’s moving window image. No, I’ll take the snow, take the cold, and let me senses go ringing.

And then I’ll complain about it, and, as another graduate student put, carry myself … contort my face … maybe even mumble and grunt like every other bitter New Englander in the winter.

So it goes.
EP

It has only been a few days since I last posted, but my scaredy-cat city has gone berserk. This time, though, we’ve managed to keep the lunacy in the newspapers. Yes, this time, we color our fears with smudges of printed ink, rather than with that peculiar Mooninite glow.

What the heck am I talking about?

T H I S :
2.21.2007 : The Boston Phoenix : Facing off over Facebook : Who’s Looking at You, Kid?
2.23.2007 : The Boston Globe : Beware the land minds in new media
2.25.2007 : The Boston Globe : Managing your online persona becomes a key career skill

Consider yourself warned, I guess : watch your back, etc : because someone’s coming for you.

It seem to me that this coverage represents something of a backlash to the popularity of Web technologies - FaceBook & MySpace, in particular. More than that, though, it seems to signal a backlash to the indifference Web users have about the ways that the information : their online personas, etc : can be accessed, used, & used to incriminate them.

I’m reminded of Jackie Orr’s genealogy of panic disorder, in which the sociologist pays attention to the production of panic during the Cold War. No doubt Orr’s analysis is of a situation more dire : maybe, closer to our Y2003 duct-tape panic : than this current panic web . . . s i t u a t i o n we’ve got our selves into, but that doesn’t disqualify the comparison.

I don’t have my copy of Orr’s book around : nope, it’s in Minnesota : but my memory of her chapter on the Cold War, “‘Keep Calm’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient” goes something like this : armed with only the meager technologies of the media & real bombs, dropped on some simulated Anytown, U . S . A., our politicians & military men waged a battle for the our psyche, which was : most of the time : politically indifferent to mushroom clouds & other doomsday imagery. During a cold War, this indifference was a liability . . . was evidence that the threat-from-Out-There wasn’t understood; so through all sorts of scare-tactics, the federal government attempted to mold a bold, new citizen : prepared for the worst-case-scenario, but, through the processes of preparation, fixated on the severity of the scenario.

Now, while I acknowledge the gap in severity : a bad resume ain’t nothing like a mushroom could : it’s time to bring this back to the Web.

It seems that we have an indifferent population, that’ll say what it thinks & mean what it says & will give out all sorts of incriminating evidence online, no matter the consequences. & this population isn’t panicking, isn’t holding back, isn’t, to paraphrase one of the classics, bothering all that much with the presentation of the online self in their everyday, online lives. Perhaps, as the two Boston Globe articles suggest, this is a population that wants to live with (not in) a past : that doesn’t want to play some game of cultural amnesia, forgetting all the messy loose ends.

So if we need some order, if we need to (re)consolidate the voices that matter, why not watch them where it hurts : make moves on their attempts to acquire an education (see the Phoenix article) & a job.

& so it goes, so it goes : . . .

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are — and what they are doing to mess up their resume? Follow the cybertrail.

EP

To celebrate the fact that I’m generally behind the times when it comes to tracking down & reading blogs, I’m linking to a good entry by David Brake of Media @ LSE on the concerns parents have about their children’s web use. I’m about seven months late on this entry, but, given some of the articles & discussions to which I’ve linked lately, David’s mid-July entry remains relevant. Brake takes a matter of fact approach in his discussion, noting that

Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’.

Brake adds two links to some other entries he has written on issues of privacy & surveillance. Both are worth reading.

EP

A The Lives of Others - ” the best surveillance movie since The Conversation,” according to one reviewer - showed up at my local theatre. This means two things. Firstly, I have to rent, borrow, or thieve a copy of The Conversation. Secondly & obviously, I’ll sit in on a showing of The Lives of Others one of these days.

The posters that my theatre is using to advertise this film includes two lines : “Nothing is private” & “Nothing is sacred.” The implication, I suppose, is that the sacred happens in private; & the violation of the private is a violation of the sacred. This is driven home by the images the poster employs : a rather drab&serious authority-type juxtaposed with the cool flesh&desire of the protagonist & his girlfriend.

Of course, the film is more than the poster & I haven’t yet seen the former, so my skepticism about the claim : “Nothing is private. Nothing is sacred.” : is aimed more at the notion that the presence of a well-protected border between public & private is only desirable than it is at The Life of Others.  It seems to me that a more robust discussion of what it means to exist visibly, in both public & private, would yank these distinctions, as well as the notion of surveillance, out a field that frequently conceptualizes the visible person as citizen, employee,  consumer, or child & the gazer as an official, employer, market researcher, or pedophile.

Anyway, I’m confused.  You’d think that the critiquing surveillance would be easy, but to avoid the “doom & gloom” position without finding oneself on the side that shouts about how great technology is & how perfectly adorable all this user-generated content is requires some finesse.

EP

Four days after offering up “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” New York Magazine gives us this (intentionally) mis-titled piece :
“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Internet Exhibitionists.”

“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy” posited that the Web habits of children, teenagers, & 20-somethings erode the (illusionary) border between private lives & public spectacle.   But this is a double-border : or so the article’s story goes : between these spaces & between child & the parent.

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Enter the toy-makers, who can hook parents up with all sorts of filtering & surveillance devices that can keep the bad things out : namely, the pedophile : but, according to the authors of “Mama, Dont’ Let Your Babies…” can’t (yet) get at what seems to really be irking parents  :

But, still, we can’t help wondering what the point is. Isn’t it just a matter of time till these kids are showing themselves off to the world, anyway?

&, still, I can’t help wondering what the point is.  Isn’t one of the concerns that youngsters already enjoy the allure of the audience & spectacle of the Web?  So why add another audience?

Now, I know it’s one thing to have an audience of online friends & another to have a parent (or teacher) watching.  But, according to “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” even the meaning of that difference is diminishing.

Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” says Kitty Ostapowicz, laughing. “But I’ve always said I wouldn’t ever put up anything I wouldn’t want my mother to see.”

&, anyway, don’t these toys just accelerate the erosion of the private? & confuse that  erosion with play?

EP

I was raised in house on a “half-mile stretch of narrow road in the shadow of the Shawangunk Ridge,” where “our past, our present and our future collide and struggle to somehow co-exist.” Today, no matter the cul-de-sacs, no matter the acres of (zoned) sub-divisions, landing hi-speed Internet requires persistence. You need to harangue cable companies : get them to explain; inevitably, though, we’re told that the necessary equipment - the cables or whatever - stop running a half-mile from the home, in either directions. It’s up-hill both ways, or something like that.

In the late ’90s, no one missed hi-speed Internet because most of us hadn’t yet been exposed to it. In the late ’90s, from the fringes of most meaningful, high school cliques, I took to the Web, putting up crappy pages & engaging in non-sense debates in my local newspaper’s forum.

Yes, before I had landed my first kiss, I’d landed my first url. Both, I’m not afraid to admit, were sloppy as hell. Those old geocities site addresses invoked ancient architecture; my first web page was housed in Geocitie’s “Colosseum.”

In the late ’90s, my peers were emailing & instant messaging, but they were certainly not forging robust online identities. But then the Web changed. Many of us moved into dorms at colleges, learned what an Ethernet cord was, learned we didn’t have to dial-up, & learned that none of us had to contribute to what must have been an outlandish-electricity bill. We kept our computers on 24/7.

More importantly, whenever our computers were on, AIM was on. Profiles became personal ad-space for the witty & profound. Away messages proved one of two things : you had somewhere to be or you were groping for a slogan that made it sound like you had somewhere to be.

From the fringes from all meaningful social cliques, I groped for slogans that made it sound like I had somewhere better to be. (But then the Web changed.) My one-or-two line away messages - quotable quotes, of sorts - earned me a fan-club of AIM nobodies. Not of automated, virus-ridden messages … those came later, but of AIM buddies I neither knew nor knew were looking. One day, one of them messaged me, complimenting my away messages & letting me know that s/he had friends who also kept me on their buddy list just to read my aways.

So there was an audience; sometimes anonymous, sometimes not. (Before the RIAA infiltrated file-sharing networks & freaked university ITS’s out, students who shared the densest & most eccentric mixes of music were minor-celebrities; if you ran into one, you’d be genuinely excited & refer to them by their network computer name.) &, by offering their attention, these audiences could elevate an online contribution to something greater than the mundaneness from which it emerged. (Or, at least, that’s where my away messages came from.)

In other words, when the Web changed, it was time for popular kids to ransack the fringe’s bandwidth.

I woke up this morning, to read again about the day the Web changed. This time, the narrative came at from me a New York Magazine feature “Say Anything.” (Tiara.org directed her readers, including this one, to that link.)

“Say Anything” is an eight (web)page sojourn through the generational gap between the prophets & junkies of Web 2.0 & their parents. In what might be the most profound passage of the feature, the latter - the parents, hand-wringers, ITS administrators, & surveillance studies professors - are the insane ones.

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

This is an eloquent & compelling defense of our Web habits. Surveillance is nothing new. Orwell, we know, sensed 1984 in 1949. & it was in 1965 that Bob Dylan warned that the “phone’s tapped anyway.”

(Then again, it’s been 42 years since he warned us that the vandals took all the handles & that hasn’t come to pass…)

Of course, this defense (or excuse?) for Web habits, as well as cultural attitudes about them, ignores, as both tiara.org & Kenneth Rufo point out, the context in which : who? teenagers : FaceBook, MySpace, & YouTube : politicians : market researchers : off privacy.

This is not to say that to put an address or name or image online is only naive or is really that much more exposing than the pieces of us we leave (or have taken from us) during our day-to-day.

It is to say that this article, as entertaining as it might & as littered with hip-looking teenagers & 20-somethings as it might be &, especially in its discussion of the changing face(s) of fame, as profound as it might be, ignores the efforts of a whole lot of political, social, technological, & corporate forces to develop the webscape of privacy.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound(?)

A final thought. If you read the New York Magazine article pay attention to how “old” ways of doing gender creep into this story. See, especially : the (now) familiar story about the sex tape : in this article, at least, always released by a man : who, apparently, has nothing to lose in exposing how he performs sex : to the detriment - or gain, as the case may be - of a woman. It’s not new, nor surprising, but it’s there. Just another “symbolic edifice … as structuring principle” (to again quote Kenneth Rufo) that points us to the intensity & expense at which the privacy of some, & not others, erodes.

EP

What has it been, an hour or so or so, since I outlined some of the claims about new media that are circulating in the blogosphere?

(Everytime I use that word - blogosphere - I can’t help but feel a little guilty. I know Swarming Media blogs on wanting to off the word, but I haven’t had a chance to read that entry yet. I do get a sense, though, that the most popular of the terms used to describe blogs, social networking sites, user-generated content, etc. are quite imperfect, sacrificing the diversities of the Web for the simplicity of catch-alls.)

It has only been an hour or so, yes : well, perhaps three, perhaps six before this is posted : but I want to spend some time considering the last claim about surveillance.

From that entry : 4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

Nathan @ Swarming Media has written on vision & the panopticon in two entries at his blog. The two - Seeing and Being Seen & The New Self-Regulating Subject - fit together rather coherently. Hopefully, I can sum them up here without doing significant damage to Nathan’s writing.

(Note to the reader : Yup, right now, I rely heavily on Swarming Media : that’s because that blog is so damn good.)

It seems to me that the heart of Swarming Media’s take on panopticism is articulated in “The New Self-Regulating Subject.”

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

The components of this statement recur in “Seeing & Being Seen” : distribution (& decentralization) of the panopticon; “identity traces,” which are left in other users’ (conceptualized both as a multitude of others & an other / swarm of the multitude) fields of visibility; & participation in a mass regulation of others’ identity traces. The sum of these components is put succinctly in another Swarming Media entry:

If the disciplinary society was defined by the controlling individual / controlled mass duality, then this new control society is defined by the reversal of that duality: the controlling mass / controlled individual.

It occurs to me that this entry might read like a Very Short Introduction to swarmingmedia.com. So I’ll try to move on. But before I do, one final thought on the imagery of this version of surveillance, especially that of prisoners-with-binoculars. What’s clever about this image is that it accounts for the appropriation of the means of surveillance to (re)view the activities of those authority figures who like to hang around the panopticon. You know, the ones who used to do all the watching. At the same time, it accounts for the decentralization & multiplication of fields of visibility, which makes possible the “controlling masses.”

If this reading of Web panopticon is correct, then efforts to enforce centralized surveillance & control on the Web is regressive; it is as if policy-makers interested in controling Web use are relying on architectural designs ill-suited for the Web.  (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link on McCain’s proposal to create a national database of illegal images.)

Professor James Doyle of Duke University observes something happening in the transformation from Bentham’s model to the one outlined by Nathan. Indeed, Doyle might call this transformation a slippage; not that power decreases, but that our capacity to see power as power diminishes when the panopticon becomes decentralized.

If the first conclusion of this study is that the state may actually have more power than the digerati believe, the second conclusion is that the attractiveness of technical solutions stems not simply from the fact that they work, but that they apparently elide the question of power — both private and public — in the first place. The technology appears to be “just the way things are”; its origins are concealed, whether those origins lie in state-sponsored scheme or market-structured order, and its effects are obscured because it is hard to imagine the alternative. Above all, technical solutions are less contentious; we think of a legal regime as coercing, and a technological regime as merely shaping — or even actively facilitating — our choices.

Technological solutions : think filtering software, site “ratings,” etc : (this article dates from 1997) : does not signal the end of power & the liberation of the end-user, free to choose which privacy & security devices to use. It involves something more complex : the “hardwiring” of power - sometimes state power - directly into the “technologies of freedom.”

Ten years later, it seems that Swarming Media contributes an update to Doyle’s work. Doyle was largely concerned with the seepage of the state into technology; Nathan might be arguing that the Panopticon has seeped into the design of this new Web . Seeped, I say, because the architecture has changed, but the effects seem to be more or less the same.

I mean, who needs John McCain, ISP surveillance, & messy debates about privacy, what constitutes obscenity, & the reality of digital depictions of bodies when volunteerism - code or some Net-savvy boys - will do the work for you.

EP
PS : I’m not as down on visibility as I sound. I swear. I’ll get to that & the pleasures of visibility some other day.

I have surveillance on my mind; my mind is a mess.

What I mean is that I’m considering : ruminating on, you know? : competing claims & competing (stories about) realities of surveillance & technology : a few of which come from some very articulate bloggers. What I mean is that I have a handful of knotted hyperlinks & a short stack of books, footnoted, in a small room. Not to mention an empty blog in which I can try to talk to myself about this.

(Familiar with the White Stripes’ ditty “Little Room”? It occurs to me that these new Web technologies are helping us solve the timeless dilemma Jack White poses in that song;

“Well you’re in your little room /and you’re working on something good /but if it’s really good /you’re gonna need a bigger room /and when you’re in the bigger room /you might not know what to do /you might have to think of / how you got started sitting in your little room.”

Here I am, in a small cluttered room, feeling a little squashed by the stack of articles at my feet, the print&bound editions books at my elbows. But - ah! - I found out about RSS feeds, & RSS readers, & my del.icio.us - & things are beginning to clear up. I may never have to leave this little room after all. But all this is beside the point.)

: COMPETING CLAIMS :

My knowledge & understanding of the claims being made about social import of user-generated content is partial, in more than one sense of the word. (1) I can’t claim “ethnographic authority” in the composition of these claims; I have been reading blogs & blogging for a little over a month now. & (2) I’m involved in a sociology department that emphasizes power-reflexive methods; such reflexiveness will, you can probably guess, position me on a particular half of the continuum of optimism/pessimism about the social uses & effects of the Web.

That said, the competing claims, as I see them this afternoon, go a little something like this.

(1) Web 2.0 democratizes public discourse.

This is the most optimistic narrative about Web 2.0. The basis for this optimism is the explosion of access to &, following from that, participation in the media. It is this understanding of new media that Time magazine expressed when it named “You.” its Person of the Year; You, the magazine claimed, were busy during 2006 “seizing the reins of the global media,” “founding and framing the new digital democracy,” and “working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

(2) The democratization of the media democratizes democracy.

Tiara.org cleverly points out that Americans don’t live in a direct democracy, so this claim really means that “political participation” increases in “meaningful ways.”

Evidence? :

• Jennifer Earl, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that the Web both facilitates offline protest & replaces it, becoming a venue of activism. (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link.)
• Politicians might just be more afraid of bloggers than they are of Catholics!
  
• The accessibility of technologies of surveillance allows for the surveillance of authority.

There are smart & important discussions of the types of democracy that emerge from the Web : see, for example: tiara.org’s skepticism & Swarming Media’s hyper-democracy. Specifically, though, the final claim about surveillance is what interests me most. It’s at this point that I notice the turn from optimism to pessimism.

(3) Democratic surveillance is no democracy at all.

In a previous post, I cite William G. Staples thoughts on this. They’re worth repeating here, since they’re exemplary.

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

Of course, simply because access to surveillant technologies increases does not mean that the uses of it are equalized. Again, tiara.org’s blog is informative; the promise, she writes, of Web 2.0 to provide filtered, personalized content is tethered to “behavioral marketing” practices. (In my imagination, my meandering entry on Cymfony & data mining buttresses tiara.org’s concise critique of this marketing strategy.)

This kind of surveillance seems benign - a perfection, of sorts, of marketing techniques that we’ve already accepted; Staples, in fact, refers to it as “soft” surveillance. This doesn’t signal the end of “harder” forms of surveillance; surveillance that seeks to uncover deviance & wrong-doing continues. &, given the ambiguities about standards of decency & obscenity & given the breakdown of a strict difference between real & fantasy : what constitutes real, digital child pornography, for example? : & given the diversification & saturation of technologies, these forms of surveillance frequently expand their “field of visibility” in order to increase their efficiency.

(4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

According to Swarming Media, participatory media generates a new, self-regulated self.

According to me, a critique of contemporary surveillance must account for the pleasures derived from mass participation in it.

& it’s on this : the pleasures of surveillance : that I’ll conclude this entry : GPS shoes make people findable : because find-ability is safe-ability : the dream of a perfect visible :

EP

Turns out, John Edwards’ bloggers will keep their jobs.

So, to recap, Edwards is employing a blogger who once wrote

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

& Virigina elected to office a Democrat & novelist who wrote

“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

Yes, the subject of this entry is a bit … just a bit … hyperbolic. But something’s happening, & hell if I know what it is.

EP

It’s true.

(1) YouTube helped keep George Allen out of office.
(2) When Michael Richards exposed his inner racist, cell phone video was there.

&, (3) more recently, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports wonders what might have happened to high school basketball phenom OJ Mayo’s rep had hand held & cell phone cams not recorded his (non-) confrontation with a high school ref.

Specifically, Wojnarowski writes

Once, the wire story would’ve shaped the public’s perception of that strange high school scene in West Virginia. America’s best high school basketball player would’ve been framed as something of a punk, what with him getting ejected for trash talking, chasing down an official and knocking him on his fanny and all.

The highest and mightiest would’ve wagged those fingers with a “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” toward a system that creates these holy teenage terrors, and O.J. Mayo’s reputation would’ve been shot to hell.

Only, the truth didn’t come out through the West Virginia Secondary School’s Activities Commission’s spin, or game referee Mike Lazo’s dubious reporting of events. Through the footage of hand-held cameras and video phones uploaded onto the Internet since Friday’s game between Huntington and Capital high schools in Charleston, this turns out to be a different day of truth-telling in sports.

This time, the kid isn’t so easily boxed up and stereotyped.

This time, the grownups had to be accountable for behavior, too.

Wojnarowski spin on “what-could-have-been” sounds pretty believable to me. Mainstream sports coverage does a god-awful job keeping sane & speaking sanely about African-American basketball players. (I’m not going to rehash this here; see Sports Media Review’s excellent blog for a discussion of media coverage of African-American basketball players.)

& Wojnarowski is probably correct : thanks to those handheld cams, as well as to the ease with which those videos can be uploaded & shared, OJ Mayo’s rep hasn’t suffered much in light of this incident. &, given the content of the video, that seems fair.

But is this it? A better democracy because we’re watched better?

If it was, perhaps we could take those lovable YouTube guys to their favorite bars, purchase them a drink, & thank them. Mission accomplished, you know?

But consider that Slate.com’s Michael Agger calls camera phones “the gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on.”

(Somewhere in the recesses of his Orwellian paranoia, Agger hears Foucault whispering that Panopticon is the gadget that the curious, the child, the philosopher, and the pervert can all agree on.)

Then there’s Willam G. Staples lamenting in Everyday Surveillance

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

After hitting you with all this, I have nothing to conclude with. No thesis, no theory, no “best-fit” rhetoric to navigate the complexity or, as Staples suggests, contradictions of democracy and surveillance : We value privacy; privacy protects racism, sexism, & homophobia.

But here are some inConclusions anyway … more hunch & gossip than theory

(1) There’s something a little disturbing about “the masses” turning surveillance back onto ourselves.
(2) Increased surveillance of authority is as likely to produce more nefarious & cynical strategies of p.r. than it is to effectively keep the bad-ass behaviors of the powers that be in line.
(3) Surveillance might normalize public behavior; think Michael Richards & his brethren consistently not calling for the lynching of black people. It might even normalize private behavior; think Folely & his cronies consistently not using instant messaging programs for deviant purposes. But there’s little that cell phone cams & YouTube can do about the distribution of wealth, health care, minimum wage, etc. You know, those structural issues. Yes, the personal is political, but it’s not that political.

EP