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