When talk of surveillance arises, in everyday life, my experiences have taught me the responses will carry a theme similar to "everything we do is being watched", "my details are all tracked", "someones watching me". Despite the range of outlandish paranoia infested drivel, their is a degree of truth, however, we're not "live on channel 4". "This isn't Davina", and yes, yes we can swear.
Surveillance begins at a young age. As a baby and infant there's always people watching you. Be it parents making sure you're safe, whether it be at your playgroup or nursery when people are employed to ensure your safety. Even other infants watch you, like, for example you're in the midst of assembling a dynamic, implausible lego tower.
Even as you get older, go through primary years at school, the consensus is you aren't ready to be responsible for yourself, teachers will look out and watch you throughout school. At home parents will have a wandering eye fixated on their childs' every movement. Even if you're playing out, mobile phones and curfews have now made it almost impossible for a child to escape the clutches of their parents. Unless they wanted to.
As we hit adolescence, become more independent, communicate less with our parents and transcend our personality from a likable, soft spoken child, to unruly, loud, unnecessarily angry teenagers, the watchful eye is still their. Throughout your life it's there.
Now, at 19, nearly 20 and out my teenage years, there's so many devices where my details can be tracked. Whether it be my mobile phone, Facebook and Twitter pages, cards from various retail stores or credit cards.
Gary T.Marx summarised these thoughts in his "Encyclopedia of Social Theory" when he said:
"With the trend toward ubiquitous computing, surveillance and sensors in one sense disappear into ordinary activities and objects –- cars, cell phones, toilets, buildings, clothes and even bodies. The relatively labor-intensive bar code on consumer goods which requires manually scanning may soon be replaced with inexpensive embedded RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) computer chips which can be automatically read from short distances."The idea that so much in our everyday life can track us is a truly frightening prospect. Yet when you regain your breath, sit down, make a cup of tea and begin to think through said prospect, is it?
For example, i hold reward cards at Game, Gamestation, Blockbuster and HMV, (i like video games). These companies know this. I've purchased items from all of them enough, that they know down to a fine detail what genre of games, music, DVD's i like. Why do they need to know this? Well, if their having a sale, they want me to know it's on. They want to know if the items on sale appeal to me. How would they find this out? Well. Ummm, huh? They could just check my history of what i purchased there.
Gamestation don't want to hack my phone. They're not the News of the World. They want to sell me games. They want me to spend money in their store. How can they enhance the chances of me returning. They appeal to things they know i like/enjoy.
The thought that contemporary society has floated into some overblown, Orwellian world where we can't move without being watched. Is this a problem? On every High street there's CCTV. They aren't interested in whether you're going to Blockbuster, or whether you've quickly detoured into Tesco Express. They're their to be a legal watchdog. If you were mugged, CCTV gives the police a greater chance of catching the mugger.
If you abide by the law, then cameras watching you in public aren't interested in you.
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