Sousveillance

Sousveillance = watching from below

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Definition

Sousveillance is the conscious capture of processes from below, by individual participants; surveillance is from the top down, while participation capture is inscribed in the very protocols of cooperation and is therefore an automatic ‘inscription’ of what we are doing. Sousveillance may lead to the emergence of a Participatory Panopticon. See also the concept of MAPPS, i.e. Multi-laterally Assured Pervasive Permanent Sur-/Sous-veillance.

The emergence of the Participatory Panopticon

"Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves. This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily. I call this world the Participatory Panopticon." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002651.html ;)

An update by author Jamais Cascio, at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002855.html

Examples

David Bollier:

"Sousveillance is commonly directed against police as a way to document their (anticipated) abuses. The classic example is the amateur video footage of LA policemen brutalizing Rodney King in 1991. Now that lightweight cameras are everywhere and footage can easily be posted on YouTube and other websites, sousveillance videos have documented police abuse in Malaysia, gay-bashing in Latvia and union-busting in Zimbabwe, as one account describes.

A British website concerned with surveillance has taken note of “FitWatch” – “the tactic of filming the Met Police Forward Intelligence Teams and sharing photos, badge numbers and names.” In the United States and Canada, there is a network of volunteer organizations called Copwatch that monitor the police and host a user-generated database of police misbehavior.

Sousveillance is not just about watching the police. The Web site HollaBackNYC.com invites women to post photos of any man who tries to harass them. In Sierra Leone and Ghana, people used mobile phones to monitor for irregularities and intimidation during elections in 2007.

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." (http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2014)

Discussion

David Bollier introduces Equiveillance theory:

"An excellent Wikipedia entry notes that an equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance may have positive effects. “Equiveillance theory” argues that sousveillance may reduce or eliminate the need for surveillance:

In this sense it is possible to replace the Panoptic God’s eye view of surveillance with a more community-building ubiquitous personal experience capture. Crimes, for example, might then be solved by way of collaboration among the citizenry rather than through the watching over the citizenry from above. But it is not so black-and-white as this dichotomy. Rather, there is a simple shift in the equiveillant point, as, for example, more camera phones enter widespread use, we might be able, as a society, to be more self-reliant, on our own communities to keep an electronic neighborhood watch. This variation of sousveillance (“personal sousveillance”) has been referred to as “coveillance” by Mann, Nolan and Wellman." (http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2014)

More Information

See our entry on the Participatory Panopticon

1. Listen to the podcast by James Cascio at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/James_Cascio_on_the_Participatory_Panopticon
2. http://sousveillance.pdf by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, all professors at the University of Toronto.
3. The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Key Books to Read

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. David Brin. Perseus Books, 1999

In this very thought-provoking book, Brin argues that the loss of privacy is an inevitable given. The key question then becomes: who owns the means of surveillance, and in this context, the democratic solution of control by all is much preferable. Recommended, even if you do not tend to agree with the conclusions of the book.

Partial online version of The Transparent Society, by David Brin, at http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html