Video Surveillance and Everyday Life

• Author: Nils Zurawski
• Published date: 01 December 2007
• Date: 01 December 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567707311578
• Subject Matter: Articles

Video Surveillance and

Everyday Life

Assessments of Closed-Circuit

Television and the Cartography

of Socio-Spatial Imaginations

Nils Zurawski

University of Hamburg, Germany

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become the icon of surveillance, both in popular culture

as well as in actual politics. Its prosthetic forms penetrate the public sphere and spaces. This

article discusses results from a study for a more differentiated view on CCTV in everyday life.

Interested in the knowledge and assessments of CCTV, the author conducted a two-layered

study in Hamburg. Combining a qualitative study, to explore the field and formulate hypotheses,

and a quantitative survey, to test some of these assumptions, provided a rich set of data for the

analysis of CCTV in everyday life. Mapping methods were used to gather material on issues

such as in/security, spatial mobility, and social stereotypes. The analysis shows how spatial

perceptions and socio-spatial imaginations influence the assessments of CCTV in the different

research areas. With these results, the author discusses aspects of surveillance measures such

as social sorting and its spatial dependencies.

Keywords: cartography; CCTV; cognitive mapping; Hamburg; socio-spatial imaginations;

surveillance

Introduction

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and their adjunctive system have become the

icons of modern surveillance technologies. Much research has been undertaken in the past

few years to assess the effect of these technologies on society, on human relations, and on social,

political, and cultural dynamics—research that varies considerably in its focus and method-

ology. Theoretically, studies have discussed the role of cameras as panoptic technologies of

social control, leading toward a surveillance society of heightened or even total control,

employing theories of discipline, and the role of penology under postmodern conditions

(Bogard, 1996, 2006; Lyon, 2001, 2003, 2006; Marx, 2005). Other authors have focused on

the effectiveness of the technology with regard to crime reduction, crime control, and crime

269

International Criminal

Justice Review

Volume 17 Number 4

December 2007 269-288

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Author’s Note: The author would like to thank his research assistant Stefan Czerwinski for comments on the

article and many helpful ideas and discussions, Robert P. Kopyciok for the statistics of the quantitative data, and

Matthias Otto for the wonderful cartography and his GIS work. This article is based on a study that was made

possible through a grant by the German Research Council (DFG ZU 124 / 2-1&2). The author would also like

to thank Torin Monahan for his helpful comments and suggestions on this article.

prevention (Gill, 2003; Gill & Spriggs, 2005; Welsh & Farrington, 2002). More ethnographic-

oriented research has focused on the observers themselves—the practices of video surveillance

in the control rooms and their social and political discourses (McCahill, 2002; Norris &

Armstrong, 1999; Norris & McCahill, 2006). Comparative studies have endeavored to produce an

overview of different approaches concerning the implementation of CCTV across Europe

(Urbaneye working papers, 2001-2004, http://www.urbaneye.net). Yet, fewer studies have been

devoted to research on how CCTV is affecting personal lives or how, indeed, people assess

video surveillance and incorporate it into their lives and perceptions of the social (Fischer &

Helten, 2004; Marx, 2005). This article draws on research undertaken in Hamburg, Germany,

between 2003 and 2006 that focused on socio-spatial perception and assessment of CCTV

in two neighborhoods.

Two goals were driving this study: first, to describe and analyze socio-spatial percep-

tions of people in these areas and, second, to investigate the knowledge, assessments, and

attitudes toward camera surveillance among the same people. Underlying these research

goals was the idea that those perceptions may provide leads with regard to a more differ-

entiated view of CCTV among people, eventually finding out why people support or reject

CCTV. I believe that CCTV, as part of the real world, is incorporated into general world-

views and is thus part of what Berger and Luckmann (2003) coined “the social construction

of reality.” For this, the concept of cognitive mapping was employed to (a) gather material

on socio-spatial perceptions and (b) provide a framework for the analysis of these data and

their possible consequences. Cognitive mappings, or a cartography of minds, can help to

understand the spatial, social, and anthropological grounds on which surveillance discourses

and its practices are based, or may be planted, and being successfully introduced. Less

concerned with the direct consequences of CCTV or other technologies, I wanted to find out

how these are incorporated in the process of constructing reality as well as why and where

these would be supported or rejected.

In this article, I argue that CCTV and indeed other surveillance measures have a basis that

lies in social and spatial imaginations of society, which in effect are social constructions. To

research these, the concept of cognitive mapping as introduced by psychologists and behav-

ioral geographers will be used and reformulated to make it applicable to research socio-spatial

imaginations. First, I will therefore describe the methodology used in my research, then discuss

some of the theoretical assumptions and approaches that influenced the study and are used in

the analysis (i.e., cognitive mapping, space, and social construction of reality). I will then

present and discuss some of the results from the qualitative study to illustrate the usefulness

of the methods of cognitive mapping for social research concerning surveillance politics and

social discourses as well as for the formulation of hypotheses that could be tested with other

approaches (i.e., a quantitative survey that was conducted to verify some of these assump-

tions). The third part will conclude with some data from that quantitative survey, testing some

hypotheses made. The final conclusion will then include a reflection on the limits and obsta-

cles of such an endeavor. In doing this, social constructions of reality will be put in spatial

context that also seems to be paramount with regard to practices of new surveillance that

focus on contexts, categories of people, or space as the object of surveillance, rather than on

distinct and concrete people (Marx, 2005).

270 International Criminal Justice Review