Most of the literature on surveillance focuses on how government and corporate entities use ICTs. David Lyon has done some of the best work in this area, and Steve Graham recently published an edited volume, Cities, War And Terrorism, with many good pieces. However, there is another perspective, the implications for everyday ICT use on the surveillance of members of our personal networks, that is less often discussed. The exception, is the work of Nicola Green, one of my favorite articles by her is \”Who\’s Watching Whom? Monitoring and Accountability in Mobile Relations\” in Wireless World. Nicola points out the very real importance of the ubiquitous question \”Where are you\” in every mobile conversation. What has me thinking about all this is a cleaver little video short called Call Register, a good example of the impact of new media on surveillance within and with our personal networks. It is also worth pointing out the growth of recent tracking services for your teens and loved ones: article.
A busy week for local location technologies. Carlo Ratti, a colleague from my former department at MIT is doing some interesting work on real-time mapping of WiFi users on the MIT campus: CNN article. You can see a real-time image of users of 802.11 hotspots on campus here. In addition to aggregate data, MIT WiFi users can choose to make their individual identity visible on a map. Carlo has also been doing work on real-time visualizations of cell phone network users in Austria: Press release. The images are stunning – both visually and socially: Graz in real time. Exciting example of how location aware services can be used and visualized. Hopefully no one figures out how to hide a Wi-Fi device on someone and stalk them across campus.
In related news, Google has announced the release of Google Local for Mobile. A nice little Java application for your cell phone that streams Google map info. At the moment it does not use the location information (GPS or other service) available in almost any newer mobile phone to identify your current location. However, last year my students and I developed a similar Java application that pulled location from Java enabled cell phones – so we know it is coming soon!!! Much easier to hide a cell phone on somone and stalk them than with a WiFi device.
I-neighbors.org is still larger than any other U.S. / Canadian neighborhood based web service that I know of, but the number of sites similar to i-neighbors.org continues to grow. Backfence.com is focused on the Washington D.C. area, they currently support only three neighborhoods but intend to expand across the U.S. Their website mentions that they recently received 3 million dollars in start-up funds. Nice website, surprisingly consistent with the features offered at i-neighbors.org, although it appears to focus on a bulletin board type system rather than email lists. eBlock is a similar for-profit initiative. While not yet available for wide spread public use, they are currently running trials on a few \”blocks.\” Blocks are their unit of organizing, limiting each neighborhood group in size to rather small predefined geographic areas. They are still looking for funding before they expand. I\’m still not convinced that there is a for-profit model for this type of site, but I am really interested to see how these sites progress. I am also surprisingly conflicted, i-neighbors.org is a non-profit research project designed both to build neighborhood interactions and to encourage the development of other local social capital Internet initiatives, but I feel a surprising need to compete. If the site is to continue to grow I think it needs to evolve. It will become increasingly difficult to remain competitive with other sites based on my shoe string academic funding, especially when other sites can attract venture capital, but stay tuned for i-neighbors.org v.2.0 some time early next year.