... I remember very clearly the first CCTV camera that appeared on our high street back in 1997. It was the size of a breeze block perched on top a 20ft pole as thick as a basket ball. I was 15 years old at the time and remember playing hide and seek with the camera while waiting for a bus. It was a novelty and a curiosity as the watching camera turn in my direction while I hid in a shop front and then popped out again.
It was only a few years later when I read Nineteen Eighty Four that the curiosity turned to creepiness.
Like all new technologies and policies that infringe on our civil liberties there was a movement against cameras and I was on the front line. I hated cameras. I felt scorn whenever I walked down a high street or entered a shop. I'd poke my tongue out and make funny faces or put two fingers up. I felt invaded. (Still now, I will sometimes make a point of looking straight at a camera, just to break the weird unsaid social taboo that says we're meant to pretend they are not there.)
Public space had suddenly become a place where your every movement was recorded. God forbid if you wanted to do anything out of the ordinary, like dance or sing or stop suddenly in the middle of the pavement for a moment of profound thought, or pick your nose, or pull your nickers out of your bum unless you wanted to attract the attention of those ever recording cameras - not that I would have done these things when other people were around anyway. But sometimes, on late night walks home from the pub and no one is around, it would be nice to be able to reenact the singing in the rain dance without having it recorded and stored on some security database for the rest of eternity.
I have always wondered about the conseqences of knowing that one is constantly being filmed and what it does to ones choices. Firstly, does the way I walk or the way I interact change? Do I become more self-conscious? Did the self-obsessed culture of selfies come from a need to control the sense of always being watched - by always watching oneself? What does it do to my stress and anxiety levels?
And what is the effect of cameras on our moral lives? If I am no longer faced with the choice whether to steal something or not - due to the camera being pointed in my face and effctively taking away that choice - does some kind of moral muscle atrophy? If a camera is not around am I more likely to take the opportunity to steal believing that if i can't get caught then its morally ok?
Its funny how we've all become used to being watched. There is a constant knowing that they are always there - remembered when one needs a wee behind a car or a quick snog in a shop doorway - but we seem to get on with our lives regardless.
They were meant to keep us safer (that ole line) but do they really? Women still get assalted, people still get shot, terrorist still plant bombs, even under the ever present gaze. Recently a building a work for, which is covered in CCTV, was broken into and even though the assailant was caught on camera we still couldn't prosecute because we couldn't see their face. We could only watch helplessly as the recording showed this person racking up £2000 worth of damage.
Rather than a crime solving tool they just seem to be a warning - be good, your being watched!
Its almost like the religious control programs that used God as the all seeing eye of morality have been mutated by the secular world into these little all seeing mechanical eyes of The Government...
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