Jon Bright (London, OK): Fascinating article in the Register here about Shoreditch's "Digital Bridge" scheme, which the council has been using to provide internet services over TV sets. One of the unique aspects of the scheme is that it allows members of the community access to CCTV footage from their area - something which has seen massive uptake:
Atul Hatwal, project manager at the Shoreditch Trust, said the CCTV hook-up was the main reason why people wanted to get the Digital Bridge internet access through their televisions.
"In focus groups, the biggest thing they said to us was it made them safer, because if you are in a public space you know someone's watching."
The Information Commissioner had ordered the homesnoop CCTV be handicapped by low resolution to prevent the watchers from identifying the people they were watching.
"You couldn't recognise specifics, but you could see if there was trouble happening or if someone was roaming about. It made people feel safer," said Hatwal.
Indeed, residents were bothered by the restriction and not at all worried what implications the scheme might have for civil liberties or community.
"Not a single resident came back and raised [CCTV] as an issue," he said. "It was the defining thing that made people say, 'Oh yes, I want that', and they wanted to see more detail [in the CCTV images]."
The implications of this are pretty mind boggling. One of the things about CCTV cameras has always been that it would be impossible to employ enough people to watch them all. But could we envisage a society where everyone is watching everyone else - where community moderation becomes not just a term for moderating online discussions but a real life phenomenon? Using distributive energy (getting lots of people to do little bits of work) to achieve massive tasks has been one of the most interesting ideas to come out of the internet - and its applications for surveillance are immense.
"Does Big Brother exist?" asks Winston Smith in what I think was his final confrontation with O'Brien (anyone writing a piece about CCTV is legally required to mention the novel 1984 at least once, and make some insinuations about a dystopian future). That he might be able to exist in part in all of us - and the fact that we might actively demand his creation - is an idea I find intriguing and not a little worrying.
UPDATE: See also this post by Felix over on oD Today.
