Etymologically, surveillance means “watching from above”—from the French words sur (“above”) and veiller (“to watch”). It’s a term that has been used in English since the start of the nineteenth century, and refers to the covert monitoring of a situation by an individual or institution.
The far more recent word sousveillance inverts all this, taking its first four letters from the French word sous (“under”). It’s a knowing reversal of the traditional term, and one that captures an important contemporary phenomenon: the monitoring and recording of a situation not by a covert external authority, but by someone actually participating in it, usually via a portable device like a smartphone or webcam.
This idea of “watching from below” is a core element of the democratization of media technologies—that is, the process that over the last few decades has seen recording and broadcasting devices become both affordable and increasingly universal. The word sousveillance itself emerged well after the impact of this change first began to be felt, and appears to date to a 2002 coinage by Steve Mann—one of the pioneers of wearable computers and cameras.61
Mann defined sousveillance as “watchful vigilance from underneath,” emphasizing its anti-establishment credentials, inspired by the experience of pointing his own recording devices at surveillance cameras recording him—an act he originally termed “shooting back,” and which was the title of a video work he filmed using precisely that process of filming those engaged in filming him.
In 1998 Mann also launched in Canada what he at that time called “National Accountability Day”—marking out December 24, the busiest shopping day of the year, as a time for “shooting back” that has gradually become a global phenomenon. In 2002 it took on the label “World Sousveillance Day.”
Perhaps Mann’s most radical gift to both vocabulary and the field of sousveillance itself is the device called an “EyeTap.” A tiny camera worn in front of the eye, it is able both to record exactly the same image as the person themselves is seeing, and to superimpose on their vision a computer-generated image. EyeTaps proved to be a useful tool in the practice known as Cyborglogging—that is, the construction of “cyborg logs,” or blogs created by people who are using wearable computing and recording devices in order to function as “cyborgs” (a word itself explored earlier in this book).
The increasing affordability of wearable cameras and other devices may make all this sound a little quaint, but then there’s also something a little sinister about the realm of “coveillance” we’re entering—in which wired-up citizens are all constantly recording each other. In fact, the anticipatory fear of this mutual broadcasting and recording led way back in 2005 to the coining of the notion of “equiveillance,” described by Mann and his colleague Ian Kerr as the possibility of finding a happy equilibrium between surveillance from above and sousveillance from below. It’s a proposition toward which Kerr confesses feeling distinct “ambi-veillance,” not to mention an unfortunate fondness for awful puns.62