The panoptic schema of "eye in the sky"

Abstract

Control exerted through surveillance in its many forms is a ubiquitous part of everyday society. For instance the estimated 4.9 million Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV) installed on the streets of the United Kingdom – accounting for 20 per cent of the world's total – means that walking in the streets of the UK your image can potentially be captured on surveillance cameras up to 300 times in a single day. The nature of CCTV technology itself is unable to intervene in acts of crime. This lack of intervention is, what Foucault (1975) claims, gives the panoptic schema its strength of 'power of mind over mind'. Through this paper I argue that the effect of CCTV networks on citizens is pernicious in its psychological method of control based on sociologically and politically motivated constructed anxieties of personal security and insecurity. With the implementation of CCTV networks in our contemporary era portrayed as preventative, safeguarding individuals and their freedom, I critically analyse citizen relational behaviour in public spaces, and towards other citizens, and considered how collective responsibility has been absolved and shifted towards the ever-present gaze of the 'eye in the sky'. Ultimately CCTV institutes a moral regulation, an imposition of social norms, at the exclusion of 'others' and 'difference' within public spaces. These spaces are consequently activated as sites of psychological incarceration aimed at behavioural self-control, what Lyon (2013) calls 'moral architecture'.