Surveillance vs. Souveillance

Steve Mann distinguishes between SURveillance which means "eye-in-the-sky" and SOUveillance which emans bringing cameras from the heavens, "down to earth". ("Sousveillance")

Surveillance refers to situations where people of higher authority such as government, department store owners, safety guard and the like watch and monitor the citizens, shoppers, and suspects from the above. The authority is often seen as "Godlike" rather than down as the same level as individual parties. He refers the capture of multimedia (audio and video, etc) content of individual activities by a high entity as surveillance.

As an inverse of surveillance, he suggests the notion of souveillance, which refers not people of high authority looking down, but individual parties looking up and looking around, such as citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers (looking up), or individuals recording scenes around for personal experiences (looking around), etc. So it is both a reversal of hierarchical structure, and human-centered experiences.

Surveillance//souveillance
God's eye from above//Human's eye view, down to the earth

Cameras' usually mounted on high poles, up on ceilings//camera down to the earth, at the ground level

eyes in the sky//eye in the eye

watch from above//to watch from below

architecture centered, cameras mounted on or in structures// human centered, camera carried on or worn by people

recording made by authorities, remote security staff // recording of activities made by the participants' of activities

In most of states, it is illegal to record other parties' phone conversations//in most of states, it is legal to record conversations when you are a party

recording is usually kept in secret//recordings are made public (e.g.on the www)

processing is usually shrouded in secrecy // processing is based on open source

originated from panoptic in the context of prison, surveillance tends to isolate individuals from one another, while setting forth a one way visibility to authority figures// it has the community based origin, it brings people together, and makes the large city functions more like a small town, with the pitfalls of gossips but also the benefit of sense of community

privacy violation tends to be unnoticed, unchecked and not be self-correcting//privacy violation is usually immediately evident, and tends to self-correcting
it is hard to talk to people behind the surveillance cameras//there is chance to talk to people behind the souveillance cameras
when combined with computers, surveillance tends to rely on cooperation with the infrastructure around us//wearable computing, doesn't require cooperation with the environment
the locus of control tends to be on the authorities// it is possible for the locus of control to be more distributed, to rest with individuals