‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon.

Abstract

Deriving from Foucault’s work, space is understood to be crucial in explaining social power relations. However, not only is space crucial to the exercise of power but power also creates a particular kind of space. Through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power is electronically extended. The article examines parallelisms and differences with the Panopticon and contemporary cities: visibility, unverifiability, contextual control, absence of force and internalisation of control. Surveillance is examined as an emotional event, which is often ambivalent or mutable, without sound dynamic of security and insecurity nor power and resistance. Control seems to become dispersed and the ethos of mechanistic discipline replaced by flexible power structures. Surveillance becomes more subtle and intense, fusing material urban space and cyberspace. This makes it impossible to understand the present forms of control via analysing physical space. Rather, space is to be understood as fundamentally social, mutable, fluid and unmappable – ‘like a sparkling water’. The meaning of documentary accumulation changes with the ‘digital turn’ which enables social sorting. The popularity of ‘webcams’ demonstrate that there is also fascination in being seen. The amount of the visual representations expands as they are been circulated globally. Simultaneously the individuals increasingly ‘disappear’ in the ‘televisualisation’ of their lives. The individual urban experience melts to the collective imagination of the urban. It is argued that CCTV is a bias: surveillance systems are presented as ‘closed’ but, eventually, are quite the opposite. We are facing ‘the cam era’ – an era of endless representations.