This week’s New Statesman column is on sousveillance:
Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly as the paparazzi do, is it any wonder you crack?
This column has written a lot about surveillance, but in a world of cheap, portable technology, there is also sousveillance.
Sousveillance, or “watching from underneath”, counters the unblinking eye in the sky with millions of tiny blinking ones belonging to each one of us. In the surveillance society, or so the theory goes, sousveillance is the tool of the surveilled, keeping a watchful eye on the watchers.
Read the rest here.