Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Move over, Big Brother (02 Dec 2004) Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, calls the spread of citizen surveillance “sousveillance”—because most cameras no longer watch from above, but from eye level. Instead of being on top of buildings and attached to room ceilings, cameras are now carried by ordinary people. The video images of Rodney King being assaulted by police officers and the horrific pictures of prisoner abuse from the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are the best known examples. But as Mr Mann and his colleagues organised the first “International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance” in April, there was no shortage of reports on other cases: in Kuwait, a worker took photos of coffins of American soldiers being loaded on to a plane; in New Jersey, a teenager scared off a kidnapper by taking his picture; in Strasbourg, a member of the European Parliament filmed colleagues making use of generous perks. Camera-phones could have a profound effect on the news media. Technologies such as newsgroups, weblogs and “wikis” (in essence, web pages which anybody can edit) let people distribute images themselves, bypassing the traditional media, notes Dan Gillmor, a journalist, in his recent book “We the Media”. Camera-phones make everyone a potential news photographer. Unsurprisingly, old media is starting to embrace the trend. The San Diego Union-Tribune recently launched a website to gather camera-phone images of news events taken by their readers, and the BBC also encourages users of its website to send in pictures of news events. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3422918 Read 58 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Playing to win     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy