he last decade witnessed a flood of justified concern about surveillance. As Foucault's '70's conception of the Panopticon went warp-speed thanks to the emerging digital technologies of the last 20 years, we've had much urgent writing on the topic. The journal Surveillance & Society is one interesting example.
But there's an opposite trend emerging—labled by one group "Inverse Surveillance"—that's producing new technologies and applications that enable individuals to reclaim the glaze by visioning their own lives in interesting new ways.
For example, check out this announcement for a small conference on "Inverse Surveillance" taking place in April. [When they say small they mean it: there's only room for 25, and the "Program Committee" already has half that many members!] Their list of proposed topics is a telling indication of how they conceptualize the topic:
• Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;
• Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs);
• Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems;
• Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids;
• Recording experiences in which you are a participant;
• Portable personal imaging and multimedia;
• Wearable technologies and systems;
• Ethical, legal, and policy issues;
• Privacy and related technosocial issues;
• Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones);
• Safety and security;
• Technologies of lifelong video capture;
• Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders;
• Research issues in "people looking at people";
• Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences;
• End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?);
• Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer;
• Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient;
• Interoperability and open standards;
• Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective;
• Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective;
• Computer Vision, egomotion and way-finding technologies;
• Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres;
• New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras;
• Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors;
• Electronic News-gathering and Journalism;
• Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing;
• Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality
Many new applications are aimed at technologizing self-recording. We're entering an era of dramatic redefinitions of the family album. [Even while we're still being surveilled.]
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