Friday, July 15, 2005

A Transparent Society?

Following on from David Brin's work of 'The Transparent Society', recent articles such as The Gurdian's 'The age of sousveillance ' discusses how ordinary people using their ability for someone to be in someplace at all times, have the true mobility of surveillance using their own tools - such as phone-cameras and other recorders.

If surveillance becomes part of people's everyday mobility, will this lead to increased transparency - as in the recent case of the Korean "dog-shit-girl" - a test of the Internet's Power to Shame:

According to Japundit, "it began in a subway train with a girl whose dog made a mess on the train floor. When nearby elders told her to clean up the mess, she basically told them to f... off. One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone of her and posted it, without any masking, on a popular website which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture".

Is mobility merging with forms of social transparency and self-organising order?

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