Always on Panopticon, haha! that rhymes. The “panopticon”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon, whether we like it or not is here and most people are not at all happy about it.

It’s almost invetible that massive shifts in culture are going to be met with resistance. Those shifts, however, also open doors to new amazing and opertunities. We should really be taking the time to understand what it means and then try to deal with them as best we can.

The good folks over at “worldchanging.com”:http://www.worldchanging.com have written a really interesting peice about the “Rise of the Participatory Panopticon”:http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002651.html

Soon — probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two — we’ll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves.

This won’t simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily.

I call this world the Participatory Panopticon.

The article goes on to decribe how mobiles phones are laying the foundations of this participatory panopticon. Not only do the majority of phones available now have cameras but they also have the capabilty to share pictures and video via the internet. The article paints a vivid picture of the future could look like using all this shiney new technology.

But, as “I mentioned earlier”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2006/01/16/endless-filming, you don’t have to be using all the latest cutting edge technology. Now, all you need is a TV. ‘Mash’ created “ABSOtv”:http://www.asbotv.com to look alternative ways of using the ‘All Seeing Eye’

The Open CCTV broadcasting idea is quite simple. If we are able to tune into a CCTV camera at any time via a dedicated channel at home and watch whatever it is looking at; does that not create a unique opotunity for use on the other side of the television. I am talking free/open televison broadcasting.

Imagine this if you will…
A small amateur dance group or team of film students with lofty desires to show London their art, place an advertisement describing the time, date and location of their “stage.” A small well lit square of pavement directly below a publicly accessible CCTV camera.

Are you getting the picture ?

Projects like ASBOtv can give us a glimpse of the new avenue’s of expression these technologies afford. And it definately emphasizes the _participatory_ part of the Participatory Panopticon.