Opening the Black Box

The Work of Watching

Gavin Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134085828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolize the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilize municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how precisely they influence things. CCTV cameras might appear inanimate, but Opening the Black Box shows them to be vital mediums within relational circulations of supervision.

The book principally excavates the social relations entwining the everyday application of CCTV. It takes the reader on a journey from living beneath the camera, to working behind the lens. Attention focuses on the labour exerted by camera operators as they source and process distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in search of disorderly vistas, visualizing stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. But the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice.

Opening the Black Box, therefore, contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated 'riskscapes' through the prism of camera circuitry. It probes the positioning of camera operators as 'vicarious' custodians of a precarious social order and engages their subjective experiences. It reveals the work of watching to be an ambiguous practice: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal disruptions in the self.

Part I
Problematising and contextualising watching practices

1
Towards supervisory circulations

Circuitry coordinates

Sensing disruption: the work of watching

It seems prudent to commence a book on supervision with an overview of two pivotal processes that have come to distinguish the contemporary supervisory landscape. For ‘visibility’ and ‘visuality’ characterise in important ways two crucial components of supervision: one, the capacity of an observer to expose things teleoptically (the visibility part); and two, the phenomenological experience of confronting and being able either directly or indirectly to manipulate the representational form of an exposed phenomenon (the visuality part). Such scene setting is critically important, for our purpose here is to examine sociologically a specific para-social relation and set of concomitant sensations induced as a consequence of life becoming increasingly visible (exposed) and visual (textualised). We are concerned with addressing exactly how a group of closed circuit television (CCTV hereafter) camera operators – or ‘reality inspectors’ – respond to their working environments and to their role as social order supervisors; and how in the course of their organisational duties they, as absent onlookers, source and process a concatenation of telemediated sequences. It is the gaze these workers repetitively project through a machinic interface that is the impetus for producing a visibility relation (i.e. rendering visible an external object) and for encountering a reflected visuality text (i.e. a visualised scene relating to an observed item). Precisely what a given image expresses – often disruptive bodies, risky behaviours and disturbing manifestations in the case of CCTV produced vistas – and how it is deciphered and managed by the spectator as part of an industrial contract and affective experience, are to be our principal focal points.

While sight is a paramount, albeit taken-for-granted, sense for many, vision for those positioned behind a camera lens and television screen has additional significance: it becomes a sensorial resource for marketisation. Camera operators are in the peculiar business of exploiting their sensory faculties to detect incongruous incidents and to receive financial and moral recompense. They are, in other words, an assembly of professionalised watchers who, from a remote position or vantage point, exploit teleoptic¹ means in an attempt to manufacture orderly ends. However, the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice. The camera operators’ attention, therefore, is formally directed to the detection of disorderly rhythms: to sensing impending social disruption. Powers of sight are utilised to identify risky scenarios or calamitous actualities, to diagnose behaviour that is either threatening or transgressing appropriate codes. Tacit knowledge is expended in the screening and profiling of sequences, in surmising antecedent derivations and predicting probable eventualities from telemediated stimuli. These workers render ‘motion profiling’ as a sellable skill: a distinctive service that can be actioned for accomplishing organisationally stipulated goals. Systematised watching becomes an occupational activity. It becomes a career. It starts influencing perceptions of self-identity.

Individual camera operators, of course, possess more than just a work-attributed personality. Their subjectivities are also inscribed with an array of alternative social identities and cultural values, as women, as young people, as parents, as citizens, as incapacitants, as believers, as consumers, etc. Considering exactly how these contrasting biographical filters influence what is caught on camera, and get contorted by what is viewed on screen, is what motivates this particular inquiry. That is to say, we are interested in how telemediated images operate as technologies of domination (how they ferment particular perceptions), and how they are absorbed by the territories of the self (how they intersect with internalised wills for stability, solidity and amusement) (Foucault 1988, 18). It is the dynamic and relational nature of this exposure, and the conflation processes it stimulates at the level of subjective experience, that is the object of analytical attention. This involes our asking how CCTV operators influence what is seen, and are affected by this contact.

This book is ultimately about the distanced, but intimate, involvement of camera operators in parlous occurrences – the opportunities and challenges contingent on such perspicacity. It contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated ‘riskscapes’ through the prism of camera circuitries. It seeks to discern how supervisory practices reflect and inflect selfhood. By engaging the subjective experiences of camera operators as they cogitate their role, Opening the Black Box, therefore, probes the distinctive positioning of these spectators as vicarious custodians of a precarious social order. It reveals the work of watching – that is to say, disruption ‘sensing’ and ‘processing’ – to be an ambiguous pursuit: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal discomposure within the self. By excavating the social relations entwining the everyday use of CCTV, the reader is taken on a journey from living beneath the camera, to labouring behind the lens. Although CCTV cameras might appear inanimate and inertial, this interpretation overlooks their implementation as relational and motional mediums: as communicative propagators and as societal gauges. Cameras, in fact, serve as conduits for circulations of supervision. An empirical excavation and problematisation of their circulatory capacities is what forms the substantive focus of this book.

Interpreting dedicated watching: the surveillance fix

While surveillance is now ubiquitous, it is also diverse, multi-faceted, and employed in such a panoply of projects that it is almost impossible to speak coherently about ‘surveillance’ more generally.

(Haggerty and Ericson 2006, 22, emphasis added)

CCTV camera operators partake in supervision. They are telesupervisors of the moral and social order. But why conceptualise their actions in supervisory terms? Why not conceive their activities as being tantamount to surveillance? The latter term, for instance, is well established, and has a distinguished history, cultural resonance, intellectual orbit and political leverage. Indeed, surveillance is typically regarded as the means through which supervisory flows are transmitted and executed (Lyon 1994, 2001, 2007). What’s more, the author has professional interests in the idiom: I convene an undergraduate course in Australia entitled ‘Surveillance and Society’ and I am an editor of the international journal Surveillance & Society. Further, I am a member of a nascent and dedicated scholarly community (‘The Surveillance Studies Network’ – SSN) who research the social impacts of surveillance interventions. Beyond the cautionary remarks issued in the citation above, the principal justifications for not exploiting a surveillance-centric vocabulary here reside in: (a) the descriptor’s etymology; (b) the form of activity it typically depicts; and (c) the precipitous way that it is applied popularly as a cliché to describe a set of diverse watching procedures. There are supplementary reasons for selecting supervisory terminology. It provides superior semantic resources for probing relational processes. We shall return to this matter later.

Defined ordinarily as either ‘close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal’ (Oxford English Dictionary) or as ‘watching over’ someone or something, surveillance has obvious ‘overseer’ and ‘oversight’ connotations. It has a proximate affinity to the unidirectional espionage executed by undercover security personnel, specifically military servicemen and servicewomen, intelligence agents, law enforcement officers and state officials, in their attempt to reveal conspiracies, identify suspicious targets and anticipate risky events. It may refer to the furtive monitoring of spouses by private investigators. As the dictionary denotation makes evident, the intended object of the inspection is a proclaimed miscreant or suspected wrongdoer of one sort or another. That is to say, surveillance tends to be evoked when we typify an act of dedicated watching by an authority figure for the purposes of knowledge acquisition or dominion. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) highly controversial PRISM programme, a scheme permitting the personal communications of citizens and dignitaries to be intercepted and profiled by analysts without appropriate consultation or consent, has been couched in such language by the world’s media.

However, watching rituals like those forming the focal point of this study comprise activities (i.e. meanings and repercussions) in excess of those specified in standard surveillance definitions. In fact, a watching repertoire is contrastive to a surveillant repertoire. The former, for instance, is unbounded (not necessarily affixed to a purpose) while the latter tends to be bounded (resolutely attached to formal outcomes). The term ‘surveillance’ rationalises the act of watching as a systematised mode of inquiry, and renders it a means to an end, rather than an end in itself (or simply a means). While knowledge accretion and power wielding can be derived from the act of spectating, they need not be exclusive motivations or objectives. Visceral nuances like spontaneity, curiosity, desire and evasiveness might feature as subliminal influences on the projection of a gaze. Watching, in other words, is not always consciously structured or instrumentally programmable, nor is it necessarily fettered to compulsions of governance. It has relational properties, and these dictate in profound ways its directional bearing and the effects it spawns. Indeed, although divergent and benevolent instances of surveillance usage do exist, for example in health care (e.g. conducting pre-emptive breast screening to identify malignant cells), or in child development contexts (e.g. measuring the assimilation of socialisation and educational programs), the locution is typically evoked when we evaluate the utility of an observational intervention to modulate, or to classify, phenomena. Alternatively, surveillance surfaces when we contemplate the ethical proportionality (or otherwise) of voyeuristic/ intrusive scrutiny. The media’s growing disenchantment with CCTV camera schemes – and its critique of their assumed effectiveness and value for money – is a good illustration of the former concern (see Smith 2012a), while George Orwell’s (1949) literary dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is an apt exemplification of the latter deliberation.

Surveillance struggles and ambiguities

There is a figurative dimension to the term ‘surveillance’ which is the source of much rhetorical dissension: a consequence of who historically has tended to use it (the powerful), and for what objectives (tyranny, jurisdictional control, social ordering, coordination, procedural efficiency and commercial enterprise). Advocates in industry and state sectors, and concerned activists and libertarians, perpetually represent and contest distinct surveillance narratives in an array of media (Haggerty and Ericson 2006, 8). The former group accentuate the efficaciousness of new technologies in their formalised depictions, while the latter group either project a despotic spectre of ‘Big Brother’ or direct public attention toward impending privacy annihilation. Each party lobbies hard to get its opinion heard. The news media is the premier battlefield, its function to host conflicting accounts and to moderate content as a seemingly ‘impartial’ intermediary (Jewkes 2004a). Social meanings attendant on surveillance processes are commandeered to: (a) arouse collective sentiment (often hysteria); (b) illuminate the security-enhancing or liberty-reducing features of particular interventions; and (c) highlight either the positive instances or discriminatory actualities resulting from social profiling techniques. Both units share one thing in common: they acknowledge the ubiquity of social monitoring, albeit from opposed value orientations. Surveillance has, as a consequence, come to be a politically charged trope exploited by partisan communities in order to promote specific doctrines – or in some cases, high-tech hardware solutions and commercial services (Jewkes 2004b; Haggerty and Ericson 2006, 13–14; Ball and Snider 2013a; Samatas 2013; Clavell 2013). Its texts and textualism – that is, the images and data produced as a result of accelerating social visibility – are manipulated strategically by each alliance to convince a broader audience of their contrasting proclamations (see Smith et al. 2013). Thus, struggles by social groups over surveillance connotations and practices add supplementary ambiguity to the label and obscure further its utility in registering and expounding watching rituals.

Surveillance is, owing to its popular application and ideological variances, a thoroughly equivocal notion (Haggerty and Ericson 2006, 21–22; Lyon 2007, 14). How we conceive surveillance will be either directly or indirectly influenced by our embodied acquaintances with it, by our financial circumstances, by our political convictions, and by the issue’s public prominence or newsworthiness – its semantic and semiotic representation at a specified moment (Jewkes 2004a). In fact, it has come in recent times to be an absorbent cliché with imperial attributes. It is all too readily elicited in daily life when we – or a discrete interest group – wish to describe external monitoring practices or the broadcasting performed by those wishing to reveal subjective states or court the attention of an audience. Yet simply ‘surveillifying’² myriad observational processes does little: (a) to distinguish monitoring systems comparatively in terms of their genealogical histories, machinic parts, underlying purposes, operating realities and social effects; and (b) to differentiate contextually divergent exposing techniques and exposure experiences. On the contrary, unrestrained applications of surveillance, in governmental articulations, in commercial advertising and in cultural discourse, debases any empirical precision or explanatory merits that the descriptor might otherwise offer to a social inquirer, especially one interested in registering relational mutations and phenomenological facets. It weakens, in important ways, the trope’s epistemological practicality and ergo its conceptual purchase. As Hier and Greenberg (2009, 74) note, ‘In the absence of a clear set of criteria to define surveillance qua surveillance, conceptual confusion will continue to detract from the analytical value and political significance of surveillance studies’. In other words, our volition to surveillify overzealously any structure or system embodying a watching component constrains significantly our ability to engage imaginatively with the variation of social relations springing from visibility-visuality interplays. It leads to our simplifying and making pedestrian a multiplicity of elaborate social processes: socio-technical convergence, rule negotiation, representational semiotics, instinctive hermeneutics, labour exertion and affectivity, to name only a few.

Surveillance studies: foci and characterisations

Firmer ground in terms of research rigour and conceptual sophistication (though not necessarily political objectivity) has been populated by a province of inquiry orientated to the critical analysis of surveillance-subject interrelations. Comprising a globally distributed and transdisciplinary scholarly collective and abundant thematic concerns, the surveillance studies field has expanded its purview, profile and portfolio exponentially in the last two decades.³ Its constellations organise yearly transcontinental conferences, events composed of diverse audiences and featuring a profusion of topic threads. An extraordinary array of books and papers are now appearing, and a brief survey of the field’s premium journal, Surveillance & Society, exhibits the empirical and theoretical heterogeneity that is moulding and extending the parameters of this research domain. Yet even within this progressive and valuable scholastic realm, surveillance – the central object of inquiry – tends either to be deficiently described or to be viewed rather superficially as a vehicle for securing social asymmetries and for managing social problems. A comprehensive conceptual definition of surveillance that adequately accounts for its many operational nuances and relational specificities – that is, its contrasting meanings and expressions – has still to materialise. Perhaps this expectation is unrealistic and misplaced, especially ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Problematising and contextualising watching practices
• Part II Engaging the means of watching
• References
• Index