Mann's Piece

I was really fascinated by the way Mann presented surveillance and his “recipes” for both reflectionism and diffusionism. Although I have not come to a firm stance regarding the validity of surveillance and the boundaries of privacy, I think that the idea of totalitarian surveillance may become inevitable with the advancements in technology—the automatic face recognition, television set top-boxes, a proposed shower/bathroom mirror with built-in camera, and etcetera—and people’s growing curiosities of their surroundings. To an extent, I would not be surprised if we ultimately take surveillance to be a commonplace entity in our lives that is expected and permanent. As Mann concocts various experiments revolving around the reversion of roles between the security and the customer, I began to notice the numerous ways surveillance (whether it is personal or officially confidential) can be executed through the video surveillance superhighway—either through personal documentaries, being personal safety devices, and etcetera.

I thought that his WearCam concept portrayed reflectionism within the surveillance community very well because it allowed security to experience what it feels like to be scrutinized and present an alternative perspective on what is usually a one-way judgment. I think the most interesting experiment he executed was the WearCam as Cyborgian Primitive because to think that a camera is considered to be a prosthetic is rather extreme but his analysis was logical. Mann’s diffusionism seems to be a more unsettling concept because its goal will literally make a camera’s presence ubiquitous. It would go beyond just a department store or a building, people will feel like they are confined everywhere because of the various walls that the cameras’ screens set up. I noticed that Mann tries to end with diffusionism being a good solution of immortality to our inability to remember or see everything; however, I feel that this would be worse than what is being controlled by the government because at least they are doing it for some purpose, as opposed to satisfying a need that everyone might not want to have, like how some do not want to remember certain memories. The government or business surveillance are subject to certain regulations and rules, which is different from the situation where everyone would have a camera; because the more common it is, the more acceptable it could become, where personal invasions are too superfluous and commonplace that upholding the regulations would not be possible.