The lecture we had on surveillance technology really interested me, for something that constantly surrounds us on a daily basis, it was an area of new media technology that I never really thought about. It wasn’t until we started discussing exactly how surveillance affects our lives that I realised how much its importance had grown. Today we are constantly monitored throughout everything we do, be it walking down the street, shopping or even being a work. It is said that on an average day we are caught on one CCTV camera or another many more times than you would expect.

But even though the use of such technologies I seen by many people to be a modern development, the practice of ‘keeping an eye’ on society isn’t a new concept at all. Back in 1916 Ford sent social workers round to the houses of his employees, ensuring that they were meeting his expected standards, both in terms of family life and morality, among many other specifications. Even though this isn’t really on the same level as the monitoring that goes on in the work place today, it does run along the same lines, the idea behind the practice is the same.

Today such technologies have been put into place so that workforces are constantly measured, watched and placed in to league tables. Even single transactions by individual workers are often kept on record. I work in a bar and at the beginning and end of every shift I have to sign in and out, then each individual person is given specific till numbers. This allows us to log into the tills and carry out sales, but more importantly perhaps, it lets the management know exactly what each of us is selling at any particular time. Even such a small thing like a till receipt roll can give a huge amount of information, it can show busy periods and popular products, briefly giving an insight into our customers. Information like this is often used to rank workers in order of performance, although my workplace doesn’t do this, my sister also works in a bar in Whitehaven, there they have a board in the staff room displaying the top 10 workers each week, ranking one colleague against another. Each of these features is part of the surveillance society we are living in.

After the seminar I was walking home, talking to Sarah about how we are monitored in society. We started talking about the security cameras in high street shops, I was shocked when a member of the class told us how sensitive the security cameras in stores are, saying how they could even read credit card details from inside a purse if it was opened. So then I thought that if they could read something as small as that, then they can surely read things like text massages and phone numbers off a mobile if it was being used in the shop. You never really think of small, private things like that being watched, but they obviously are, almost everything we do can be watched by one thing or another. Mobile phones tracked down, personal messages recorded and credit card use kept an eye on.

All parts of our lives are constantly watched and recorded, from birth certificate to death certificate, everything we do is monitored. Cameras watch our every move, be it high street CCTV cameras, security surveillance or satellites watching down on us from space. When reading through my lecture notes I found this quote from Virilio that sums up exactly what I’ve been talking about;

“now our cities are bathed in a constant wash on electromagnetic
and microwave radiations and signals, transmitting and receiving,
constantly moderated, tracked, assembled, disassembled
and monitored. The boundaries of the city become indiscernible,
they are at once internalised by the inhabitants and simultaneously
manifest everywhere.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Los Angeles. LA is segmented into clearly separated areas, the rich occupying one part of the city whilst the other part is lived in by migrant or poor workers. Each part of the city is closely monitored, the police department, along with other leading organisations, wanting to keep the two worlds as far apart as possible. The LA police department is actually one of the best equipped military forces on earth, it has access to state of the art systems, a 50 vehicle helicopter force and the Emergency Command Control Communication System, giving complete autonomy of operation. But not only is police security tight, many homes in LA cost in excess of $5 million, so home security is also at the top of the range. With an increased development in technology personal security in the home is closely focused on. Yet again this is just another form of high technology surveillance.