Sousveillance: definition

Surveillance is French for "to watch" ("veiller") "from above" ("sur"). Surveillance thus calls to mind Foucault's description of Bentham's Panopticon, with the "guards" having an omniscient "God's eye" view, looking down on the prisoners from above (both physically above, as well as hierarchically and spiritually above).

The term was originally coined by Steve Mann and later expanded on by Howard Rheingold

Sousveillance is French for to watch from "below" ("sous"). But sousveillance is more than merely a 20th Century "us versus them" framework for citizens to photograph police, shoppers to photograph shopkeepers, or passengers to photograph taxicab drivers (Rheingold notes that it's alot like the pedestrian-driver concept, e.g. these are roles that many of us take both sides of, from time-to-time). Sousveillance is the art, science, and technology of personal experience capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission, such as lifelong audiovisual recording by way of cybernetic prosthetics, such as seeing-aids, visual memory aids, and the like.

The legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding sousveillance are largely yet-to-be-explored, but let us consider a simple parallel example, namely the recording of telephone conversations. When one or more parties to the conversation record it, we call that sousveillance, whereas when the conversation is recorded by a person who is not a party to the conversation (such as a prison guard violating a client-lawyer priviledge of a prisoner), we call the recording "surveillance". Audio sousveillance is allowed in most states, and by Federal law, but audio surveillance is illegal in most states.

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Links

• Steve Mann's original definitions
• Sousveillance as an alternative balance, a interesting discussion on the blog smartmobs.com