[guiseppegetto at hotmail.com: [wta-talk] Participatory Panopticon]

Tue Dec 19 03:43:47 PST 2006

As for fakes, I'm not so sure this will be a big problem. In any crowd 
there's bound to be several people with cameraphones. I suspect we'll 
collectively develop a built-in scepticism, and wait and see if the other 
recorded versions corroborate the initial 'scandal'. So a fake might not 
have particularly good legs if it's followed immediately by a batch of 
different-angled non-fake recordings of the same event.

-TD

>From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
>To: cypherpunks at jfet.org, transhumantech at yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [guiseppegetto at hotmail.com: [wta-talk] Participatory  Panopticon]
>Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:00:43 +0100
>
>----- Forwarded message from Guiseppe Getto <guiseppegetto at hotmail.com> 
>-----
>
>From: Guiseppe Getto <guiseppegetto at hotmail.com>
>Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 20:11:30 -0800
>To: technoliberation at yahoogroups.com, wta-talk at transhumanism.org
>Subject: [wta-talk] Participatory Panopticon
>Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List
><wta-talk at transhumanism.org>
>
>http://www.futurismic.com/2006/12/new_column_jamais_cascio_on_th_1.html
>
>Permanent Link: http://cyborgiterationtendency.blogspot.com/
>
>Watching The Watchmen Watching Us
>by Jamais Cascio
>
>
>This November, comedian Michael Richards learned about the participatory
>panopticon. So did the UCLA police. And early in the month, Virginia 
>Senator
>George Allen learned that it can have a political bite.
>
>The participatory panopticon is the emerging scenario of distributed
>observation of the world around us, using cheap, networked tools like 
>mobile
>phones and open, web-based tools like YouTube. A rapidly-growing number of
>us have literally at our fingertips systems of capturing and sharing what 
>we
>see. Most of what we capture will be of interest only to ourselves, or to
>close friends and relatives; some, however, will have a far greater reach
>that we might suspect.
>
>What all three of the examples I cite at the beginning of this piece have 
>in
>common is that they were recordings of events that (a) the perpetrators
>would, in retrospect, probably wish to have done differently, if at all, 
>and
>(b) would have received little notice in the era before personal networked
>cameras and video-sharing websites. Certainly there may have been rumors
>that a comedian had "gone nuts" on stage, or that UCLA cops had beaten a
>student, but as rumors, they'd have a limited life-span, and would soon be
>forgotten. Because of the participatory panopticon, however, these events
>will for a very long time shape how many of us think about these people.
>
>The participatory panopticon is not going to go away any time soon. The
>publicity associated with the Richards and UCLA cases -- and the political
>impact of the George Allen "macaca" incident -- virtually guarantees that
>more citizens will have cameraphones at the ready to capture and share
>damning evidence of the misbehavior of officials and celebrities. So what
>will the participatory panopticon explosion look like?
>
>Mass Participation: The next time we see a cameraphone-recorded, newsworthy
>event, chances are we'll have multiple perspectives on it, each video
>providing additional context and evidence. On balance, this will be useful,
>as a typical response by those caught on video is that the recording misses
>what happened before, or after; the more witnesses, the greater the
>accuracy. Moreover, having multiple recordings helps to mitigate the effect
>of...
>
>Fakes: The combination of the impact of these recordings, the low quality 
>of
>the actual video, and the rise of easy-to-use digital image and video tools
>means we are almost certain to see faked cameraphone recordings of 
>seemingly
>volatile incidents, whether involving celebrities or civic officials. A
>video uploaded to YouTube can be highly disruptive to the "story" a movie
>star or presidential candidate wants told, even if the video is later shown
>to be a hoax. The initial scandal usually carries more memetic weight than
>the subsequent correction. Especially given what happened to George Allen,
>expect to see one or more faked videos used to attack candidates in the
>run-up to the 2008 election in the US. That's why we'll see more...
>
>Self-recording for self-defense: A key lesson from the 2004 presidential
>campaign in the US was that it's vitally important for protestors to make
>their own (multiple) video recordings of protests and arrests. The NY 
>police
>videotaped protestors, but apparently edited the recordings later on to
>justify the arrests -- edits that were exposed by comparisons to the
>protestor videos. If the UCLA cops that beat the kid in the library last
>month had been wearing their own personal cameras, they'd be able to
>demonstrate that the kid was, as they claimed, behaving in a way that
>warranted the beating prior to the point where the citizen cameraphone
>recording started.
>
>Self-recording for self-defense won't be much help if the individual does,
>in fact, mess up -- it wouldn't have helped Michael Richards or George
>Allen, for example. In the case of public officials, however, that's a good
>thing. If a police officer or elected leader knows that every contact he or
>she has with the public is being recorded, they will presumably be less
>inclined to behave in careless or corrupt ways. This deterrent effect would
>be even greater if the recordings were made available to the public soon
>after they're made (with appropriate blurring or muting to protect the
>privacy rights of the citizens involved).
>
>For police officials, the use of personal cameras to record citizen
>interactions would be a small step from the current use of 
>dashboard-mounted
>cameras in many police vehicles, used to record traffic stops and the like.
>As the proliferation of "true life video" programs on television shows,
>these recordings can be very useful as evidence if someone attacks an
>officer; clearly, a badge-mounted camera would offer even greater
>evidentiary value.
>
>The proliferation of cameras this scenario suggests is undoubtedly 
>troubling
>for many civil libertarians and privacy advocates. The problem is, these
>cameras have already proliferated -- the majority of mobile phones sold
>around the world have a camera, and more cameraphones were sold in 2005 
>than
>any other kind of camera, digital or film. We will have more examples of 
>the
>participatory panopticon in action in the coming weeks and months.
>Similarly, surveillance cameras have become a commonplace part of urban
>policing, whether mounted on buildings, street lights, or police car
>dashboards. What we need are rules and practices that make the use of these
>tools more responsible and transparent.
>
>David Brin refers to this as "reciprocal accountability," a phrase I
>particularly like because it recognizes that we have laws and public
>officials for very good reasons, but that they need to be accountable to 
>the
>public in substantive ways. The participatory panopticon is the emergence 
>of
>an uncoordinated, haphazard form of reciprocal accountability, relying more
>on scandal than on process. We will need to pay more attention to how these
>practices are formalized for one very important reason:
>
>The participatory panopticon watches us all; This isn't simply a concern 
>for
>police officers, politicians and comedians. Everyday citizens who behave in
>ways that draw notice -- for good and for ill -- will increasingly find
>themselves captured on cameraphones and featured on video sharing websites.
>We're already seeing example of this, from the "dog poop girl" in South
>Korea to student recordings of abusive teachers around the world. As more
>people see the value of making these recordings, and as the tools for 
>making
>and sharing the videos become even easier, we will see this become a
>commonplace part of news stories and public discourse.
>
>The participatory panopticon isn't a scenario of the future; the
>participatory panopticon is here.
>Comments
>
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