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Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books:
In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry about hackers, viruses, and identity theft. Schools and playgrounds are patrolled by guards, while spy cameras observe our children in the hallways and bathrooms. Only those who know the code can unlock the steel gates to our "planned communities." Amazon monitors our taste in books. Our cell phones take pictures and record conversations. People can't walk their dogs now without taking along their Blackberry or wearing their Bluetooth.Raban's been interested in the democratization of surveillance for a while -- he has a list similar to Dirda's in an essay he wrote for The Guardian in 2006. He spoke about it on open Source in February.
And of course, as the title suggests, the theme percolates throughout Surveillance. All the characters keep a discreet -- or not so discreet -- eye on other people. Spoken motives may differ, but ultimately it's a piece of the human condition: if there's more to know, we want to know it.
Has the novel made you reconsider your own curiosity? Or inspired you to increase your efforts to cloud the vision of Brothers both Big and little?
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I recently started The Life and Death of Great American Cities and then got distracted by shiny things in the distance (or other books, Surveillance among them) and in the first chapter Jacobs talks a lot about how the residents of safe (or "good") neighborhoods constantly watch the activity on the streets. I wouldn't necessarily have connected that with this book, although I saw Raban mention it somewhere else and now it seems pretty easy. It's weird that in the ~50 years since the book was published we've gone from championing surveillance as the cornerstone of American cities to relegating it entirely to Big Brother and creepy pervert neighbors. Jacobs was all about windows facing the street so that residents could connect with the street, participate in the street and ultimately own it. So, no, I'm not going to feel guilty about looking out of my windows at my neighbors or at people on the street (I might feel afraid to do it after the trailers for that "Disturbia" movie, but not guilty).
I've become curious more recently about people practically inviting surveillance into their lives, a la Twitter. For starters, I hate the sound of chatter because I'm biologically incapable of filtering out human voices: they compel my brain to pay attention (part of the reason I love libraries and tend to have just one or two close friends, I believe). So the idea of technology that enables people to constantly update their "network" about what they are doing, thinking, nay eating, is downright frightening for me.
I am fascinated by the idea of the democratization of surveillance, but even more than those who survey, I'm scared by those who are consciously inviting to be watched.
(And of course then Matt Baldwin had to go and find the comedic Surveillance tie-in with Twitter--since URLs are a pain in our comments, you'll have to go to defectiveyeti dot com to see for yourself.)
I think it's worth making a distinction between surveillance and being observant -- for me, the key issue is the intention of the onlooker. Looking out your window to see what's there is one thing -- looking in another person's window to gain information about that person is another. That said, people researching people online doesn't bother me nearly as much as government (or private "corporate" entities) using it as a means of establishing control (over a single person, or a group).
At least with Vanags, Raban seems to be making a point about the fuzziness of good intel/bad intel. It reminded me of the John Demjanjuk/Ivan the Terrible trial where so much depended on either decades-old memories or blurry snapshots and a fervent desire for the guy to be one or the other thing.
That kind of thing I suppose is human nature to some extent: like Alida watching her mom's wine intake under the assumption that there's a standard wino/non-wino break. But "open-ended" behavioral surveillance doesn't provide that kind of blanket security she's looking for -- you just end up in a position where you can't seem to surveil enough.
MvB wrote: 'But "open-ended" behavioral surveillance doesn't provide that kind of blanket security she's looking for -- you just end up in a position where you can't seem to surveil enough.'
Exactly so. And the more you surveil the world you think you're looking for, the less you notice of the world as it actually is...which is a crucial component of my "comedic" (and thanks for that, Courtney) plot.
Also, re Jane Jacobs, here's a curious story from Shoreditch in east London, which has set up a cheap (around $7.50 a month) cable TV channel, on which subscribers can view in realtime what's happening on the police CCTV surveillance cameras in their area. The coverage is interrupted at regular intervals by mugshots of wanted persons and youths under ASBO's (Anti-Social Behavior Orders, a recent Blair government invention.)
So where once people used to look out on their streets through lace curtains to see if anything interesting was going on out there, now the local council instructs them to play citizen-detectives, looking out to catch kids with ASBOs who are out after curfew time. I doubt if this scheme would find much favor with Jane Jacobs!
Remember those Orwellian Block Watch stickers? The blue with the black eye? Block Watch, when I was a kid in Seattle, WAS the neighborhood community organization. The block watch captain was the de facto head of the neighborhood, and the position gravitated toward by those who like to lead. Our block watch captain threw a big 4th of July party, and was an all-around great guy, but it seems strange that the only existing neighborhood community was, essentially, founded for a mission of surveillance.
A possible upside of all of the cameras around: exoneration. Of course, Larry David can't watch all of us, all of the time.
On a slightly different note, Jonathan it struck me that Lucy's revelation about how to handle her story about Vanags (no bottom, us readers as aware of our own shortcomings as much as theirs) might be a metaphor for what you were trying to accomplish in Surveillance as well? (Regardless, Lucy's "idea hangover" the next day was priceless, and hit very close to home...)
And thanks for dropping in, it has been a real treat to have this ongoing conversation with you!
Courtney: thank you kindly, and yes, indeed, on Lucy's plans for her great article. In its first galleys, the book had two epigraphs--the quote from Bachelard, and Flaubert's "Ne pas conclure". But since Vanags translates it as "Woe to those who conclude," and Lucy runs with the quotation later, I thought it a bit much to flag it on the epigraph page as well. I don't know: maybe I should have done.
I do, by the way, think some readers/reviewers have exaggerated the catastrophic element in the ending. Sure, the city's getting a good shaking (which is what it deserves), but it still stands, shivering on the brink, with everyone in the book alive and (so far as we know) well. 11-year-old Alida is in control, riding the quake, frightened (at the very end of that passage) but holding on. I sort of wanted to leave this shaking, troubled world in her competent hands. I trust her capacity to manage it, as I would not, for instance, trust either Augie or Tad.