Who Will Watch the Wearers of the Watchers?

Katherine Mangu-Ward | July 14, 2009

More on the political importance of the next generation of tiny video cameras and the first-person view they capture, plus the coining of a new term from the new mag, H+:

Sousveillance—the inverse of surveillance—is the general activity of an individual capturing a first-person recording of an activity from his or her own perspective as a participant in the activity.  Rather than watching "from above," the French “sous” means “under” or “from below.”...

While camera phones and similar portable technologies make capturing incidents like [Robert] Dziekanski's death possible by the average citizen, new integrated technologies such as the SenseCam, electric seeing aids, visual memory aids for the elderly, and Personal Safety Devices (PSDs) that record our entire lives have the potential to alter radically our notions of personal protection—and also keep those "higher up" honest and informed. These technologies include wearable, implantable, and body-borne computing devices. PSDs in particular can also provide cheap life insurance by functioning like the "black box" flight recorder on an aircraft in case of a personal incident.

More in my article from the June print mag on the super cool camera-behind-glass-eye Eyeborg project here.