Opening the Black Box
Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolise the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilise municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how 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 excavates the social relations entwining the everyday usage 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 profile distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in the search for disorderly vistas, visualising stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. 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.
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.
Gavin J.D. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University. He is the author of many reviews, book chapters, journal articles and media reports on the social impacts and implications of surveillance diffusion. His current research explicates the dynamic interplay between systems and subjects of surveillance, particularly the interpretive meanings people attribute to their visibility and the labour they invest in managing their ascribed data-body.
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