Image Credit: Elīna Arāja, Pexels

Content Warning: mentions of assault, abuse, harassment, and violence. 

Recording, scrolling, and tracking. Mutual surveillance is at a peak we’ve never witnessed before. Whether it’s having your friend’s location or recording a stranger in public, the individual has become the spectacle.

New, viral content floods social media every second of the day, and invading someone’s privacy for the sake of likes and laughs has become undeniably normalised. From someone awkwardly dancing in public or tripping over their feet, it is not rare to stumble across a video of strangers recording one another. Whilst the chances are slim that you’ll become the subject to mass humiliation online for doing some mildly eccentric behaviour in public, that doesn’t stop the paranoia; the hyper self-awareness. The subtle changes in behaviour and thought processes can easily manifest into a fear that you too will be the stranger, the impersonalised meme, in the video you just watched. This fear is nothing out of the ordinary anymore, and the natural concern for protecting our image and safety means that surveillance culture has wildly skyrocketed – especially when considering location tracking.

Apps like Find My Friends, Life360, and Snapchat Maps allow the user to share their real-time location with added contacts. The tracking, unless manually turned off, is constant and readily available to whomever at all hours of the day. Whilst these apps were created for an added level of safety amongst families or friends, it seems to have expanded outside of these closed circles – the added contacts can be anyone who simply has you as a follower, despite how little you may know the person.

This is where modern surveillance culture becomes even more concerning – Bumble For Friends reported that 54 per cent of young people view location sharing as a form of affection, a symbol of trust and friendship. Alongside this, the Australian Government’s eSafetyCommissioner found that one in five young people believe that tracking their partner’s location is part of a healthy relationship. Not only does privacy online cease to exist, but now it also does not in real life; why do we think it’s okay to 24/7 supervise our partners and friends?

Whilst the most common reason people share their locations is for physical safety, especially for women coming back home late from a night out, this tracking can be easily taken advantage of. Abusive partners or perhaps friends who are wolves in sheep’s clothing can exploit this location sharing to exercise control, violence, and facilitate domestic abuse. This illusion of safety established by these apps merely acts as a blanket of comfort, a thin veil that can be extremely easy to manipulate when in the wrong hands. 

Even then, it’s not just location sharing apps that can endanger people, but commonly used social media like Instagram and TikTok; videos that show “A Day in my Life” with exact time stamps and photos of specific locations are shared globally, often gaining millions of views. Users who post these, typically with thousands (if not millions) of followers unknowingly place themselves in an exposing and vulnerable position, one that is easily open to stalking, harassment, and assault. Images of their workplace, their gym, and even their home with the exact time they arrive and leave are the perfect fodder for stalkers. This self-surveillance allows for what was once parasocial to become dangerously real, putting their own lives at risk. Did we not all get taught online safety in primary school? 

The discomforting paradox of safety surveillance culture has created brings into question the reasons for our participating in it. Why has this mutual surveillance become so incredibly normalised? 

As well as the previously mentioned risk of women being assaulted and harassed, recording these incidents also provides a safety net for queer communities and people of colour: the increasing distrust in justice systems and police forces across the world means that the smartphone has become the shield. With these systems often not taking hate crimes as seriously as they should be, the record button on the phone’s camera becomes a defence mechanism, a vital source of protection when it feels more difficult to receive it from law enforcement. Having the video out there, at least on social media, can mean that the perpetrator can face consequences, even if they aren’t behind bars.

This sense of understanding and community seems to only exist online now, with the internet now the most readily available third space. This space is constantly awake, thriving all day and night, and is so perfectly curated to the individual user – it is no surprise that people are relying more on the internet than each other. The BBC reports that since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been far and few places that truly let us blow off steam between work and home, and as a result, people have turned to this online world for relief and socialisation. During (and even after) the pandemic, isolation wasn’t uncommon, and our phone addiction passed never-ending amounts of time. Watching and consuming other people’s lives, other people’s realities, to escape boredom and feel some sense of joy has ultimately allowed surveillance culture to become what it is today. It has always been rooted in a pervasive and intrusive voyeurism, but with the added vacuum of the internet, modern surveillance culture wears the mask of the internet as a third space to keep us passive to the disturbing reality it has simultaneously constructed. Because the internet is a third space, so too is surveillance culture. 

Everyone can know who we are, where we are, and exactly what we’re doing at the tip of their fingers, whether it’s across the world or in our own circles. Anonymity has trickled further out of our hands like water, and being surveilled is no longer an Orwellian fiction, but the disturbing reality all of us have been brought into. With this extremely 21st-century addiction to our digital technology, we have all become Big Brothers — or perhaps more accurately, little brothers — reinforcing social norms regardless of how conscious we are of this. 

I’m quite aware I sound like I wear tinfoil hats and am scared of 5G (which I would love to reassure you that I do not, and am not), but gone are the days where surveillance culture was pretty much just CCTV and a great idea for a speculative fiction novel; it has seeped so incredibly deeply into our everyday lives that we have become equally as scared of it as we are oblivious to it. We need the justice systems to step up and actually protect us, actually make us feel safe rather than turn us against each other. We can only defend ourselves so much – when are we going to be protected by the people who promise us they will?

Living in this state of fear has also conditioned us into constantly performing – having to look ‘good’ at any and all occasions, always having to say the ‘right’ things, and hoping no one saw you spill your coffee all down your top. We have stopped living in the moment for the sake of appearances, for the sake of avoiding embarrassment. There is something so incredibly liberating in letting go of this fear and simply dancing like nobody’s watching; being so drunk you stumble over the steps towards the club; singing aloud on the train home from work. It’s cliché, but life is too short to let surveillance culture stop you from being human.