In an article in this week's New Yorker magazine, Nick Paumgarten
contemplates the wider effects of GoPro, the sports-oriented wearable cameras
that have inspired viral videos of amazing stunts watched by millions on the
Internet, and things like the GoPro Mountain Games, a venue where mountain
bikers, rock climbers, and even ten-year-old girls on ziplines record every
second of their exploits for fun, and sometimes profit. (It turns out that GoPro sponsors
certain athletes with things like free cameras, or a monetary reward for
getting a million hits on a GoPro-made YouTube video.) While admitting the obvious
entertainment value of the small portable video cameras both for the users and
the viewers, Paumgarten looks at the potential downsides of this new
technology, and provides some useful food for thought.
First, he worries that people
will increasingly fall victim to what I'd call "camera-itis", which I
have suffered from on numerous vacations:
the temptation to transform a live novel experience, whether of a ski
slope, a wedding, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, into just another shot to be
captured. This is in contrast to
the traditional reason to see remarkable sights, which is to let them soak into
you and transform you over time.
For example, the way Henry Adams visited Chartres Cathedral in France.
One of the most profound
appreciations of the artistic merits of Chartres Cathedral was penned by the
American historian Henry Adams. A
reader of his book about that medieval monument to faith can sense the hours of
study, contemplation, and reflection that Adams put into his work, both in time
spent at the cathedral and in historical research. Perhaps Adams used photographs to jog his memory, but his
musings on the cathedral are about as far as you can get from the exploits
Paumgarten describes toward the end of his article: BASE jumping from famous buildings while wearing a
GoPro. Yes, the One World Trade
building does show up in a shot filmed by a clandestine leaper from that
building, who managed to survive.
But the point of that video wasn't artistic appreciation.
For readers like me who have
never heard of BASE jumping before now, it stands for "building, antenna,
span [of a bridge, presumably], earth [meaning a cliff]"—four types of
places from which a jumper whose courage sometimes exceeds his judgment leaps
in the fond hope that his parachute will deploy in time. So far, 242 haven't—that is the total
number of deaths recorded in an online BASE fatality list since the sport began
around 1981. A GoPro or other
means of documenting your exploit is a necessary part of this fringe
semi-suicidal cult sport. While it
would be unfair to shut down an entire camera industry on account of its abuse
by a few kooks, it must be admitted that the availability of cameras like GoPro
have encouraged this sort of daredevil activity.
But one of the most serious and
wide-ranging issues Paumgarten identifies in connection with GoPro-type cameras
springs from a matter I blogged about a few weeks ago in connection with the
shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Paumgarten writes "a world in which the police film
every interaction is not all sweetness and light. You may catch some bad cops, but you'd also hamstring the
good ones. . . . It deprives the police of discretion, and the public of
leniency. There are many things
we'd rather not see or have seen."
Paumgarten's chief concern here
seems to be that once a cop films an infraction, he or she will have no choice
but to proceed with an arrest. He
says a video record "has the effect of a mandatory sentence" and
enforces "uninterpretable standards of exchange."
I have spent some time trying to
figure out what he means by uninterpretable standards of exchange, and haven't
made much progress. Every image
has to be interpreted somehow.
Objectively speaking, images are simply arrangements of color on a
screen, and require perception and interpretation by a human mind to convey
meaning at all. The question is
not whether a video can be interpreted—not only can it be, it must be if it is
to convey any information—but who does the interpreting, and what principles
the interpreter follows in translating the raw images into conclusions about
pertinent matters of fact.
Paumgarten may be thinking in
legal terms that filming police encounters effectively brings the whole legal
system—judge, jury, prosecuting and defense attorneys, you name it—onto the
street corner along with the cop and the public. And of course, such a situation would markedly change the
interaction between law enforcement and citizenry. But unless we become an actual police state, with every action,
word, and gesture not just potentially, but actually scrutinized by a hostile
Big Brother, video recording of police work need not change the routine
activity of cops who deal with the public. For every arrest, there are many lesser interactions of the
"break it up, folks, there's nothing to see here" variety. And unless some lawyers find a way to
exploit the presence of recordings of this sort of minor interchange by
charging police brutality where none exists, there is no reason to think that
cops with good judgment will be any less able to deal with the public in these
minor ways than they are now. But
never underestimate the ability of lawyers to squeeze profit out of a
situation.
Beyond law-enforcement concerns
lies the greater question of how life will change as recording cameras become
more nearly ubiquitous. There have
always been foolhardy persons willing to risk life and limb for the chance to
do something that will get their name in the paper—even if it's the
obituaries. We may have a few more
of these folks now that GoPro has come along, but they probably would have gone
ahead and done something foolish anyway without a camera. In the hands of private citizens, GoPro
cameras seem to be mostly a benign influence, encouraging the sharing of
remarkable experiences by those who do not have the descriptive verbal
abilities of a Henry Adams. And
while wearable cameras hold out the promise of better evidence in police work,
we need to adopt rules that preserve the ability of the cop on the beat to use
his or her discretion in enforcing the law. The introduction of radar speed-detection devices did not
eliminate the warning ticket. And
the use of wearable cameras need not transform a police department into an
array of RoboCops that automatically mete out punishments for all infractions,
however minor or technical.
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