Just a quick post to recommend that you check out Hal Niedzviecki’s website, book and new TV show on ‘peep culture‘, the everyday culture of surveillance. It’s fascinating work, and the TV show involved Hal being under 24/7 observation.
Tag: viewer society
Who killed Bambi?
Google Street View seems to be the surveillance system we currently love to hate, and now those horrible, nasty people only gone and have killed a baby deer. How can Google possibly top this? Perhaps only if Larry Page was captured on camera punching some cute fluffy kittens…
The ironic thing is that the incident was uncovered by viewing Google Street View. Don’t people have better things to do? The more you discover about participatory surveillance or synopticism, the more you realise that the answer is probably not… which is exactly the urge (or lack of it) that Google Street View taps into: the terminal ennui of spectacular consumer capitalism. Sometimes, it’s not Foucault or Kafka or Orwell we should be reading but J.G. Ballard…