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July 15, 2009
Surveillance and Society is aptly named given the turn to the ‘top-down’ forms of monitoring and surveillance--- of employees by employers and citizens by the state---in liberal democracies. This normalisation of camera surveillance on the streets of Australia, the UK and the US is coupled with the rejection of concerns about the invasions of privacy cares as outmoded arguments by civil libertarians in the name of we need to feel safe and secure.
The press have played a central role in legitimating the visual surveillance of human behaviour in public space. The press does this by “representing order” (social control) through discourses of ‘safety’ and ‘quality of life’ that are a central foundation for the power and practice of urban development and growth under a neo-liberal mode of governance.
Roy Coleman says that:
As a process of ‘creative destruction’, neoliberalism has been destructive of forms of welfare provision, regulation of financial and monetary speculation, forms of targeted public funding and certain rights and social entitlements. At the same time it has produced “moments of creation”, including the building of free trade zones; and privatised spaces for high earner consumption; the unleashing of zero tolerance initiatives and targeted surveillance; and the development of powerful and insidious discourses aiming to re-image cities within a vernacular of “renaissance”.
Urban renaissance and redevelopment is formulated within a post welfare, entrepreneurial politics that has promoted an ideology of self responsibility underpinning a climate of moral indifference to increasingly visible inequality. What is so noticeable in Australian cities is the attempt by state governments to build a “growth machine” that is “safe for development”, and this involves the boundaries between public and private interests being reorganised with “a heightened control of the polity by property interests and businessmen.
Coleman says:
Firstly, through the eye of a street camera a host of urban social problems; including popular protest, homelessness, street trading and petty violations to local byelaw become detached from any social context, and instead defined through the lens of rime and disorder. Secondly, what is most obvious and yet often unacknowledged is that cameras overwhelmingly focus on the street and ‘street people’. This reinforces prevailing definitions of ‘crime’, ‘risk’, ‘and ‘harm’ as emanating solely from powerless and ‘disaffected’
people.
Any actions and social harms propagated by neoliberal strategists and corporate actors are inoculated by the highly selective use of the camera networks that they have established.
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