Home Surveillance: The Next Social Media?
Hidden Cameras
The most remarkable design aspect of Canary’s internet-connected home security device, in comparison to its slew of subsequent imitators, is that it does not resemble a camera. Where the names of competing products like Dropcam (now the Nest Cam) specifically mention their functionality, Canary follows Apple’s precedent of describing itself exclusively through a natural metaphor. The presence of the camera hardware is itself visually concealed within the device’s physical enclosure. Its lens blends into the similarly dark surface of a surrounding panel, within which it is also placed off-center. The panel itself is recessed between the enveloping edges of a lighter-color surrounding panel.
If the resulting form resembles anything, it is either a bookshelf speaker or perhaps a knight’s helmet; an antique means of protection dissociated from any of our modern understandings of potential threat. For a device whose internal hardware could enable similar recording functionalities to those of the two-way televisions screens in George Orwell’s 1984, the Canary makes every possible effort to downplay the potentially unnerving effect of placing such high-tech surveillance within one’s living room.
Marketing
The domestic scenes found within Canary’s original marketing materials illustrate the comfortable usage scenario implied by its industrial design, innocent depictions of children and pets peacefully protected under its watch. Its positive approach intends to empower rather than scare the owner.
It is worth noting the context of the footage being created during the Canary’s initial crowdfunding campaign. Its inventors were still trying to introduce such a camera to the world, before such products became established as a recognized and competitive market category. Their marketing strategy appears to have primarily focused on obtaining social and emotional approval for the idea of a home camera, in contrast to their current website’s more immediate overview of its technical features and specifications. (Said technical implementation also possesses its own awareness of possible privacy concerns where it includes standard encryption of the recorded footage.)
Designs created by Canary’s more recent competitors are also becoming more utilitarian. Nest’s camera nearly resembles an eye springing out of some socket to observe its beholders. Within a fictional setting, it might even be comical. Far from being concealed, its glossy black camera housing is articulated as a discrete physical mass separate from the flat grey back of its supporting frame. The shape of the frame itself in turn repeats the camera’s round curvature.
The designs of other more generic imitators are equally proud to own their surveillance roles, whether employing their own applications of contrasting colors or circular motifs to announce each camera’s presence:
Such devices are increasingly being marketed in a similar manner to other high-tech gadgets, emphasizing features and specifications in ignorance of the particularly sensitive nature of their application.
The proliferation and apparent success of such designs begs a corresponding question: could smart home dwellers embrace the feeling of being watched?
From Surveillance to Sharing
Some of the output recorded by this first generation of home cameras is beginning to take on emergent new uses beyond security, where some of their owners have begun purposefully sharing the events recorded within their homes online.
Current examples of such footage include both significant moments such as a child’s first steps automatically recorded for posterity, while otherwise innocuous events such as a pet behavior can be re-purposed in their second lives as potential entertainment. Footage of a burglary shared on Reddit attracted over 300 comments discussing its security implications for other New York City apartment dwellers, creating a public dialog around an incident which might otherwise only be discussed with the owner’s immediate local neighbors.
These devices, originally marketed as tools for helping people control access to their private spaces, are now also becoming a medium for public broadcasting and social sharing. The living rooms where such cameras are typically located could transition into becoming a more exposed semi-public space within our homes, like front porches of bygone American neighborhoods or the central atrium within an ancient Roman domus.
In the same way that the proliferation of user-operated smartphone cameras within public spaces (i.e. “sousveillance”) has expanded our accountability over the police, both the home camera’s personal security applications and their footage’s potential collection by the NSA might produce only minor social impacts in comparison to their potential as a new medium for many-to-many communication.
Not-so-candid Recording
Thinking about the experiential implications of placing constant recording within the home reminds me of a critical evaluation of the GoPro camera which I read in the New Yorker, in which the author Nick Paumgarten argues that the presence of even passively operated cameras still interferes with our ability to appreciate the live event.
… He glanced at the trail, looked again to his left, and saw a herd, maybe thirty elk, running at full tilt alongside his bike, like a pod of dolphins chasing a boat. After a moment, they rumbled past him and crossed the trail, neither he nor the elk slowing, dust kicking up and glowing in the early-evening sun, amid a thundering of hooves. It was a magical sight. The light was perfect. And, as usual, Chase was wearing two GoPros. Here was his money shot — the stuff of TV ads and real bucks.
Trouble was, neither camera was rolling. What with his headache and the ample footage of the past days, he’d thought to hell with it, and had neglected, just this once, to turn his GoPros on. Now there was no point in riding with the elk. He slowed up and let them pass. “Idiot,” he said to himself. “There goes my commercial.”
…
When the agony of missing the shot trumps the joy of the experience worth shooting, the adventure athlete (climber, surfer, extreme skier) reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content.
The presence of the camera creates a constant distraction. To the extent that recorded behavior is capable of remaining candid at all, one’s internal perceived experience of any live event would still become warped by the simultaneous awareness of its potential value as a recording.
Where a GoPro may be consciously donned for specific occasions, the Canary further extends the passive attribute of its recording by being left always-on inside the home. Will such a camera’s expanded presence also alter our perception of everyday life, or will their increased proliferation dilute the extent to which we notice ourselves being recorded?
The advent of television, as discussed in Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7, offers one possible precedent as a prior migration of a more passive form of media into our homes. From Crary’s Marxist viewpoint, mass media replaced older self-directed, personal forms of entertainment with one which integrated the agenda of capitalism into daily life. People who watched television after work continued performing labor within a different part of the economic cycle of consumption and production by viewing advertising, which generated their desire to buy products.
Home Video
Introducing devices like the Canary into those same homes could finally fulfill the incomplete promises of YouTube and reality television to place cameras on the other side of the screen, turning the home into a site of media production in addition to consumption.
Everything that we do inside our living rooms may be later evaluated for potential contribution to a larger curatorial project beyond that of the initial event. Certain moments may gain greater value (whether economic, academic or sentimental) at later points in the future, perhaps beyond what their actors could ever imagine at the time of the original recording.
Families will remember deceased kin by recalling their footage, while the childhoods of any future celebrities will be already pre-documented for sale and study. Opportunists and financially desperate people may sell the recordings of their personal activities to market researchers, and future historians will have more resources with which to understand our everyday life than were documented for any previous society.
Assuming that hard drive capacities continue to grow, pervasive recording might add value to the passage of seemingly innocuous events by allowing them to be situated within a larger temporal and cultural context. Our physical activities will become content and data.
Canary itself is also becoming aware of the potential media market created by its devices. The company shares and promotes watermarked user-recorded videos on YouTube, and has introduced a “Captured by Canary” slogan (and related hashtag) whose alliteration suggests a further attempt to brand the concept of user-recorded home footage in association with their product.
For skeptical prospective consumers currently prioritizing personal freedom and privacy over the home camera’s security benefits, additional pressures to purchase could emerge as its social media applications, and their inevitable subsequent monetization scenarios, are further developed. What will those people have left to hide if they have already been compelled to transform their private lives into a conscious performance?
