Tiscali Community Who cares

It's been said before, I am aware, but Orwell was immensely prescient. 1984 has come and gone, leaving behind an entrenched legacy of surveillance made even more powerful by the advancements in monitoring technology in recent years. Query the phrase 'eye in the sky' in your search engine of choice, and instead of a biblical reference or even the Alan Parsons Project 1982 hit single, you are referred first to surveillance camera manufacturers. Meanwhile, the unblinking eyes of CCTV cameras keep a constant watch on every street in London, and it seems that the rest of the nation is catching up fast.

What is so vexing is that nobody seems to give a damn. How could it be that in the few decades since Orwell wrote his novel our aversion to being monitored has given way to such apathy? Even as life starts to imitate art too closely for comfort, we still seem to be more amused than threatened. Middlesbrough Council has recently equipped seven CCTV cameras with a 'sound facility'. One could almost imagine the local council reading Orwell's text without any irony and using it as a manual instead, looking for inspiration on how to best monitor the proles. A press release informs us that this 'sound facility' 'allows operatives to give advice or intervene in incidents as they happen'. Advice? I picture a man standing in front of one of these devices: 'I think my wife is cheating on me.'

Having survived the tumult of the past two centuries without deigning to equip its policemen with anything more threatening than a truncheon, it seems that the British ruling class may finally be losing its hitherto vaunted self-composure. When everywhere else in Europe revolutions raged, Britain quelled its own malcontents with ease, sometimes choosing mockery as its weapon of choice. Where else could the act of attempting to blow up the parliament be re-enacted merrily with fireworks?

There is, however, more to the story. It is true that those in power today are overreacting to the antics of drunks on Saturday nights. But one cannot help but notice that 'society' on its part is also failing to counteract these intrusive advances by the state. Fear and mistrust among individuals play their part, making it seem more reasonable to trust the constant gaze of a benevolent authority rather than one's fellow citizens. Much has been said about the collapse of social bonds and the decline of the capacity for self-organisation in recent decades, and this certainly plays a part in the lack of resistance to state surveillance.

Ironically, the spread of CCTV and other forms of surveillance has been partially supported by ideas whose original inspiration was quite different. In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the late American writer Jane Jacobs advocated a grassroots, neighbourhood-based approach to safety and security. Jacobs coined the phrase 'eyes on the street' to describe how a sense of 'natural' ownership of a street ensures safety for both residents and strangers. Jacobs was no friend of bureaucracies. In the words of the Canadian critic Robert Fulford, Jacobs 'came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations'.

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