up to 300 cameras see us everyday, they monitor our every move. interactions with people, visits to cash machines, even who we are calling on our mobiles.
where did these ideas come from? what do they mean?
it's seemingly all about our freedom. by having our every move monitored it is some how protecting and maintaining our quality of life and therefore, our freedom. this relates to the idea of knowledge being power, therefore to know eveything is to have complete power. this in turn relates to Marx ideals of people thinking they're free. free to live anywhere and do anything, however it will always be within chains, or within the "eye of the law".
in the nineteenth century when photography was born, it was used to record crime scenes so police no longer had to rely upon witnesses and interpreted drawings. the idea of looking down on the body/scene could be similar to the idea of "a view from heaven". perhaps from there on there becomes an obsession with looking down on people, on everything, and again, gaining the power of knowledge.
good examples of this are Baudrillard, Paris. he created wider streets for better quality of life, but perhaps also it made it easier to monitor and control people. it regulated social behaviour, much like the regulating of daylight hours act. it was originally brought in so that the more daylight we had, the more working hours there woud be. pub opening hours were also restricted, which primarily set out to regulate how much alcohol people consumed,and by making an eleven o'clock deadline also meant that hopefully, people would have enough time to sober up for work the next day.
this links well with more recent idea of monitoring the work place. this is suppossed to be for workers safety, but it mostly generates competative behaviours between workers trying to perform better than one another.
take Los Angeles for another example, the LAPD run the city like a military mission. they have special "bum proof" benches within the city, designed to be deliberatley uncomfortable, only really good for sitting on for short periods of time and definately not for lying on! even going as far as not having any public toilets and only having them within already manned buildings, where "bums" would probably never gain entry.
overall, i've viewed CCTV and the monitoring of people as a negative thing, however, in terms of crime prevention, observation has been responsible for helping to catch huge numbers of criminals, so for that reason alone it is important to recognise both it's positives and negatives of this new type of culture.