Cyborg Cops, Googlers and Connectivism

Alexander Hayes

We have become the camera and it has become us. (Aryani, 2012)

©Marco de Angelis

I rarely leave my mobile phone out of physical reach or indeed earshot and it is almost always powered on. It has become my compass, calculator, calendar and main communication channel with literally thousands of contacts in my networked cloud.

You might agree that this is not dissimilar to your own current relationship with this disruptive technology, your personal electronic portfolio. It might also occur to you, upon reflection, the profound impact this technology is now having upon your communications with family, friends and work colleagues. At a stretch you might even acknowledge that your cell-phone is "closer" to you that you ever imagined possible a decade ago, and thus is, in relative terms, wearable.

Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The intended purpose of Project Glass products is the hands free display of information currently available to most smartphone users, allowing for interaction with the Internet via natural language voice commands.

Whilst we might recoil aghast at Steve Mann’s predictions as to our wearable, portable and existential future, we must also acknowledge that this consumption of hyper-connectivity is simply yet another transformation in humanity. Given that Project Glass now connects wearers en-mass and ostensibly ensures that they can continue with physical activity hands-free, it creates arguably one of the largest known veillance vehicles into previously unmapped territories that humans already frequent. A hands-free, fashionable and constantly connected technology positions the product well amongst the seemingly unending array of Google's seamless and integrated services.

It is notable that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt is attributed with publicly dismissing privacy concerns as unimportant or as old fashioned according to Dwyer:"When companies sell information for a living, privacy is not their priority."

Irrespective of what challenges Google now faces around its users' privacy, it seems evident that this body-worn technology is set to revolutionize the manner in which we will interact with each other in the not too distant future and conversely how others will interact with that open and captured data thereafter.

At a recent presentation, I expressed my own feelings of unease at the roll-out of body wearable technologies across the Australian Police Force, where officers are conducting trials of location-enabled body-worn cameras and digital video recorders as part of law enforcement activities not unlike what is already fully deployed in the US and UK.

At this brief cross-sector meeting of minds, of surveillance studies experts, academics, law enforcement officers and private investigators, was also an equal proportion of actors, artists, educational technologists and technology service providers. What was apparent from what might sound to be a dissimilar array of roles and occupations at this workshop was a unified interest in what this technology now poses for the law enforcement officer, for the jury and ultimately for either the victim or perpetrator. It became also very apparent at this workshop that in a crowd-filled public, the seemingly innocuous role that a cell-phone is now poised to facilitate, is, in fact an emergent omniscient inverse sousveillance.

I also spoke to cases of the use of the location enabled body worn cameras in sports, medicine, health sciences, utility services, agriculture, manufacturing, engineering, construction and transport to name but a few of the areas where these technologies are being used in an international education and training context. In many of these cases the premise for deployment of these technologies is to build upon and improve existing work practices, selected by seemingly well informed and trusted technical experts, substantially guided by organisational policy and secure data management plans pursuant.

The interoperability between these location-aware body worn technologies now opens new domains of socio-ethical consideration as to the affects that an always-on network will have on humanity as a whole.

Educators will need to shift to a networked learning theory for the digital age, a connectivism [11] so profound the very architectures of participation are set to become only but a loosely bound accreditation arrangement.

"It is widely understood that the area of digital technologies in education covers education through digital technologies. However, it must also, crucially, encompass education about digital technologies, and particularly about their social, sociopolitical and ecological consequences." (Pegrum, 2009)

What is apparent is that the general public will now need to embrace change more rapidly than ever to accommodate a cyborg cop, a omnipresent jury and a recollection of events frame by frame.

Google's first "Glass Session", which demonstrates what it’s like to use Glass while it is built, follows Laetitia Gayno, the wife of a Googler, "as she shares her story of welcoming a new baby, capturing every smile, and showing her entire family back in France every “first” through Hangouts.” (Google+ post, 2012)

Our role has changed from a passive participant in an abstract recollection to a first-person perspective; where we have become the camera and it has become us, in essence a state of Uberveillance.


Image by De Angelis, Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom, Cartoons 2012.

This post is based on http://www.alexanderhayes.com/publications/2012-cyborg-cops-googlers-and-connectivism. For more from Alexander Hayes, please visit http://www.uberveillance.com. For information about the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society in Ontario, Canada in June 2013, please visit http://veillance.me/.

Memories of Car and Phone, prosthetics of the cyborg citizen (Part I)

Kieran Tranter

Can you remember the make and model of your past mobile phones? I sort of can. I’ve had a succession of Nokias over the past 10 years culminating with an iPhone. But model number or features are a bit of a blur. Yet I had it on me and used it every day. It was a phone, it was useful, and it only made it presence felt when it was not useful: the times that it went through the washing machine (twice), dropped in the ocean (once), and shattered into several pieces having fallen from a height (twice).

Now – can you remember the make and model of your past cars? I can. In my 20 years of car ownership I have survived a 1981 silver four wheel drive Suzuki Sierra with a 1.0 litre engine and unassisted drum brakes; a 1973 baby-poo orange Renault 12 Sedan, a 1975 blue and white two-tone Renault 12 wagon; a 2002 XC Holden Barina (known in Europe as an Opel Corsa, my one experiment with a new car); a metallic green-gold 1985 Volvo 240GL sedan; and a 1997 TARDIS blue V70 Volvo station wagon (yes it is a blue box and it is bigger on the inside)...

What can be made of this distinction (aside from character judgements relating to mobile phone abuse and ownership of embarrassing cars)? Car and phone are the two prominent prosthetics of the cyborg citizens of the West; yet their memories seem to generate different degrees of affect. I remember affectionately my little Suzuki and the Renaults. I regret selling the Barina and I still miss the fear and wide berth that the 240GL Volvo was given by other road users. Car and life can be mapped coexistent; phone and life not so much. I cannot recall which phone it was that I rang my family with to tell them that my daughter had been born; but I can very much remember the drive to hospital in the Barina, with the morning sun reflecting off the silver bonnet.

There are some obvious explanations. The purchase and running cost of a car imposes itself. We remember the car because we are continually paying for it. But phones impose themselves as well; the slight trepidation when approaching the monthly bill witnesses this. However, this does not explain the level of affect. There is the coming-of-age ritual of passing the licence test that marks freedom and adulthood that could be seen as making the memory of cars more endearing. But I am sure for the next generation that similar symbolism will be associated with their first mobile phone. And it is not time spent with the thing – given I often ride a bicycle to work, I spend significantly more time with my phone than my car.

There probably is something about gender at play. As Sarah Redshaw observes in her cultural account of Australian automobilities, In the Company of Cars (2008), there is a form of maleness that is particularly entwined with the motor vehicle. Her term “combustion masculinity” is fabulously suggestive. The metallic technicality, the symbolic economy of men speaking through cars and not words, the speed, freedom, risk, and triumph of the car resonated, and still does resonate, with men the world over. Indeed, BBC’s Top Gear has become an institution and global marketing phenomena, as a celebration, and perhaps a slight parody, of this auto-mentality. The phone is a phone. It might now access the net/cloud, take photos, allow the sci-fi dream of videophone, play music and games, show TV and movies, and chirp reminders cross-linked to a diary; but even an iPhone does not have the cultural meaning of a 1967 Citroën DS 21 or 1957 Chevy BelAir Hardtop. I am pretty certain that there will not be clubs and enthusiasts in 50 years engaged in global discussions of how to source parts and repair old mobile phones as there probably will still be for the “Goddess” and ’57 Chevys.

The phone integrates to life. As Donna Haraway wrote in her iconic “Cyborg Manifesto” in 1985, “‘[o]ur best machines are made of sunshine”, anticipating our wireless reality of connectivity, and not the clunky, modernist, greenhouse-causing dinosaur of the car. The car makes life. Our cities, our lives, the way we feed ourselves, educate our children, and know space from place – the geographies of Western habitus – have been made because of the automobile. We remember the car because the car has impacted on us; even if we are fortunate never to have been involved in an accident. We don’t remember phones because they are sunshine; pleasant when there, soon taken for granted, only missed when connection to the cloud is unavailable. The car represents a certain form of cybernetic citizenship of machines and meat that has to be earned and paid for with resources, time, and sometimes blood. It has configured certain desires and modes of living that have been considered mainstream in the West since WWII. In this our past cars are remembered. There might be risks from phones – the research is on-going on the mobile phone-radiation-cancer link – and there is all that communication, data, and virtuality.  However, pocketing a Samsung Galaxy is not the same as tinkling a set of keys.