The Spy Who Blogged Me

I call up Justin for an interview. He’s at a coffee shop, a fact I know before he tells me, because on my monitor at home I can see everything he sees. So can anyone else who happens by his live broadcast. I watch Justin leave the café and walk home. There, he puts me on speakerphone so his audience can hear my side of the conversation, too. Immediately, that audience, all comfily logged in to an adjoining online chat room, starts commenting on my questions and Justin’s answers. Lifecasting creates a never-ending interactive soap opera featuring live people in real time. It’s the nadir of personal surveillance, and, according to Justin, it’s the future.

“People fundamentally like having relationships and watching other people. Something like Justin.tv is a low-cost In an age where celebrity is a lifestyle and all lifestyles are for sale, the message is clear: surveillance is something to aspire to, not fear and avoid.
41 way of having a relationship either with me or other people on the show, or with the people online. It’s almost like a coffee shop, except it’s easy — you don’t have to go anywhere. It’s TV plus Internet chat.”

Call it surveillance with benefits. You spend so much time observing someone else’s life that you actually start feeling as if you have a relationship with that person. Come to think of it, maybe you do have a relationship with your favourite lifecaster. Justin talks about his “long-time fans” who answer the questions “newbies” pose about “bathroom, sleep, sex.” These fans also have strong opinions about the choices Justin makes. “I was at a cable industry trade show, and someone said, ‘Justin doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not a good networker; he doesn’t get what trade shows are for.’ Or ‘He should have asked that girl out on a date.’ I have a guy who watches a lot, and he’s like a father, and he says, ‘Justin, you don’t eat rice.’ He’s called me ‘boy’ in the past. It’s a little awkward — you don’t really say that in real life. Sometimes he says, ‘You need a spanking.’ I think, ‘I’m a grown man, but thanks a lot for your opinion.’”

It’s easy to dismiss Justin and his retinue as extrovert freaks seeking fame and attention. But what Justin is doing verges on mainstream. Check out Justin.tv now, and you’ll find 20,000 or so other people sporting their own channels. They are on a continuum of self-surveillance — think blogs, think personal podcasts, think uploaded videos to YouTube, think the “Hal is…” one-sentence update-your-life feature on Facebook. There are millions of people on this continuum. Maybe even billions.

We create our profiles, entice into the doings of our everyday lives, and reap the rewards of self-surveillance. Surveillance Project Ph.D. student Dan Trottier tells me that the social networking site Facebook actually offers two kinds of surveillance for the price of one: “peer-to-peer surveillance, stuff like Facebook stalking,” and “more conventional forms of surveillance, like consumer surveillance.” In his research, he’s looking at “how those two kinds of surveillance mutually augment each other.”

Trottier’s research is just getting started, so I decide to do a bit of fieldwork myself. I check in with one of the many of my Facebook “friends” I’ve never met: Jeff White, a freshman at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He tells me that although the majority of his fellow students use Facebook, no one he knows has ever read its privacy code, and only a few have adjusted their profile pages to limit access. Furthermore, he tells me that although his peers suspect that teachers, parents, and even the police are sometimes on Facebook, putting up pictures of yourself at the right party waving a bright red cup in front of your bright red face is now something of a necessary ritual. “We’ve created a Facebook rite of passage where you can look cool on Facebook by posting that kind of stuff,” explains White. “I would say half of the college pictures show cups in them. You can look cool, just like you would if you bragged about it.”

Or else you think you’re looking cool, only to find out that everyone else is looking at a different picture: you passed out on the bathroom floor looking like an idiot. Widespread personalized surveillance of self, friends, peers, and neighbours leads to any number of ethical quandaries. “Perhaps the greatest challenge now,” Jennifer Stoddart tells me, “is the possibility of all citizens surveying each other. It’s the kind of thing you can do by surveying your neighbour in the backyard.” The rules don’t apply to the multitudes of cellphone-camera-pointing bloggers, social networkers, YouTube uploaders, and nanny cam enthusiasts — you have to sue. The state has no business in the webcams of the nation, and that’s why the neighbour filming us mowing the backyard in our underwear and posting the video to YouTube scares us more than a drugstore tracking our birth control purchases. The last thing we want is to be the next Star Wars Kid, on the wrong end of somebody’s unregulated camera. We want to appear in control even when we’re portraying ourselves as out of control. After that, pretty much anything goes. Wired magazine reports that the future of commercial online pornography is amateur: Jeff White’s peers all grown up, but still seeking to trade their privacy for attention.

The movement from fictional television, to broadcasting “reality,” to interactive surveillance is an insidious one. You’re encouraged to brag about your exploits, but you might also lose your job, get arrested, and have some ill-considered online photo or blog post hanging over you for the rest of your life. Those are by-products of surveillance as convenience and entertainment, but the bulk of us see them as benefits, not detriments. In the age of surveillance, the rule of law still applies, petty criminals are easier to catch than ever, and information about a potential bad date is just a click away. Not only have television and its interactive offspring taught us to enjoy watching other people go about their private lives; television has also taught us to equate surveillance with law and order. Quite simply, the bad guys on shows like csi, Law & Order, and 24 are always under surveillance — and good thing, too, because lawbreakers don’t deserve privacy.

In January of this year, Newfoundland computer store owner Dave McGrath captured the theft of a $275 computer processor on his surveillance camera. He notified the police, then put the segment up on YouTube. People all over the world watched the video, more than 40,000 times. And from the 100-plus comments, it’s clear that most of the people watching did not tune in because they thought they could identify the perpetrator. So why look at the clip? Or maybe the question is, why not? With its potential for voyeurism, lurid violence, and plots too crazy to be made up, the whole process is entertaining. No wonder the nightly news now regularly shows surveillance footage. No wonder so many people go to video upload sites to get their fix of real crime in real time.

“On the news,” says Stéphane Leman-Langlois, “they call for help to the public: can you recognize this person? Or they show risky behaviour: this is what happens, so you shouldn’t do it. Or here’s a pickpocket in action, and in thirty seconds the police are going to jump him. So the message is, this video is very helpful for policing purposes.”