YOU are at the mall. You see a security guard kick a suspected shoplifter. You are outraged, and without a moment’s thought whip out your mobile phone to record it. Congratulations, you’ve just joined the sousveillance culture.
Is this about voyeurism? In a way, yes. Sousveillance is a French play on the word surveillance. Literally, it means “watching from below”, while all those surveillance cameras in shopping centres and railway stations watch you from above. Sousveillance is the democratic version of the surveillance culture: the watched are turning cameras on the watchers.
One of the first to use the term…
