![]() You’re not being watched, you’re creating a shared moment! Society is on the other side of the lens, ready to sing “Smile! You’re on candid camera!” not at you, but with you. Though someone might be watching you, Candid Camera taught us there will always be that moment of revelation and comic relief at the end. The show achieved the success it did, the authors say, because it soothed our anxieties about Cold-War era surveillance, real or imagined. In trying to understand this urge I came across a passage from the book Understanding Reality Television by Sue Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, who argue that we've been socialized to accept the unblinking eye of the camera in our private lives by the wildly popular TV show Candid Camera. I started justifying it to myself: maybe it’s OK to want to see everything, not only to know when the dog was fed and when the mailman comes, but to see whether the teens across the street are going around the neighborhood stealing Netflix envelopes or if our neighbor is letting his dog poop on our lawn. It's a bit scary to realize that living in an increasingly digital world has made me more passive to the idea of constant surveillance-and more open to being the surveiller. Except I would have better project code names. I wanted to gobble up all the moments in and around my house, just because I could. I didn't want to create a panopticon out of distrust of my household or my neighbors, but I felt a little seduced by the lure of omniscience. I should get more of these cameras and put them everywhere and watch everything, I thought. In my rush out of the house that morning, I forgot that I had the Arlo on and pointing toward the dog bowl.Ī few moments later, more quickly than I would have expected, I started feeling the final stage of being a surveiller: acceptance. The second stage came quickly: I felt a bit dirty about inadvertently spying on my husband, who was off work that day. Why did EJ feed the dog so late? Did he forget? Did he not see my note? I was annoyed. This was my first real experience catching a human on my surveillance camera setup, and I was hit with a strange surveiller's Kübler-Ross. The dog comes running in behind him and proceeds to inhale it. He pivots and places a bowl of dog food on the floor. I watch as my husband’s feet walk into the bathroom and stand there for a minute. The most recent one has an 11am timestamp. Next I go to the app’s library, where Arlo stores short clips of captured video. Nothing’s happening, everything is still. I go to the app and select the video feed from the camera I placed there. Movement has been spotted in our spare bathroom back at home. There, I see an alert from the new Arlo home security system I recently set up. The seats are uncomfortable, the witness only tangentially related to the case. Kleiner Perkins trial, and suddenly my mind realizes I’ve been awake since 5am. Another witness rambles about performance reviews in the Ellen Pao vs. It’s a Wednesday morning, a little after 11am, and I’m sitting in the last row of seats in the back of San Francisco Superior Court.
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