I came across an article while doing another assignment about how surveillance can be miss-used and affect one’s experience within the place.
In Gold and Revill’s reading, they focus on the landscape of fear with three different topics including marginality, spectacle and surveillance. For this blog, I want to talk about surveillance with reference from an article. Gold and Revill argue that fear can come from surveillance and I believe this to be true. From the article, three ladies worked in a salon where the owner had recently put cameras in. As a result, these cameras would mainly be used for security measures right? Wrong. He instead used them to always watch his employees and would frequently call them to make comments on how well or bad they are doing. This creates a sense of always being watched and the ladies were always fearful that they were being watched and critiqued.
The ladies even went as far to get their names changed which shows how much fear as been instilled in them. Furthermore, it must be tough to work somewhere you know you are constantly being watched by your boss. What ended up happening was all three of the ladies quit their job in fear of these video cameras.
I believe that video cameras can be a good thing since it can catch criminals trying to steal products and what not but what the owner did by literally “spying” on the ladies is unacceptable and crossing the line. It is essentially and invasion of ones own privacy and space seeing how the ladies were afraid whether or not there was a camera in the dressing room. In the end, surveillance can be a good thing… as long as it isn’t miss-used.
Andrew Grant
Article (note you may need to log in your York account to read the article)
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