It is often hard, having grown up in the seventies and early eighties, to avoid harking nostalgically back to an Australia of lazy summers and apparent simplicity that is unrecognisable in 2009. There was less ‘stuff’ available then. There were no ATMs, mobile phones, laptops, BlackBerrys, iPods or digital cameras. There was less involvement with the outside world – our lives revolved around family and friends – and there was less intervention from adults. When it came to children, most adults subscribed to the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it’ school of thought: we were encouraged to be seen and not heard. Of course such directives were contravened as often as possible. We spoke when it would have been wiser to remain silent, and escaped from watchful adult eyes at every opportunity. We spent our weekends avoiding parental observation, passing our time making up games, exploring on our push-bikes, swimming in creeks, and generally getting ourselves in and out of scrapes until we were forced to go home for dinner. Years later, when I asked my mother how she had coped with not knowing where we for hours at a time she said, “I usually knew where you were – your safety mattered, but it was important to give you space, to let you learn to cope on your own”. 

It would be safe to assert that a child’s safety would still be one of the most important considerations for parents in 2009, but the issue of unsupervised freedom is less clear. Many feel a growing sense of unease with the increasing violence and uncertainty of twenty-first century Australia. There is a perception that our children and youths are at risk, either from the aggression of strangers, or from their own risk-taking behaviour. This has resulted in a steady increase in the amount of surveillance and tracking devices on the market, all aimed at helping parents and carers watch over their children’s movements, phone calls and computer usage. While there is no doubting the merit of such devices in particular circumstances (one need only lose a toddler in a shopping centre to appreciate such) the progressive normalisation of monitoring and curtailing the independent activities of our children and youths is a deeply worrying trend. Orwell would no doubt be shocked to discover he fell so far short of the mark in 1984. Big Brother is no longer confined to monitoring and regulating adult behaviour in 2008. Security cameras have become a commonplace in schools and public areas where children and youths socialise, and are being incrementally augmented with more invasive measures of control, with little complaint from the public.  

I would be the first to acknowledge the seductive nature of undivided attention, and well understand the fascination with prolonging it through the medium of film, but although pulling faces at the camera in the Medicare office or jumping up and down in front of cameras at train stations with my five year old son yelling ‘Smile for the camera’ are childish pleasures I cannot quite give up, neither can I ignore the unpleasant influence wielded by that glass-eyed custodian.

The current conditions are contributing to a generation of Über-Orwellian subjects. A generation who, through their own blurring of the boundaries of public and private space, maintain the type of surveillance on themselves and their peers traditionally carried out by governments. Surveillance does not confront today’s youth: most are active participants in what is practically an international pastime. Many see little reason to either turn from the camera or avoid the public eye. This is not surprising given that cameras are everywhere, monitoring everything: traffic lights, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, and government offices to name but a few; while readily available mobile phones, digital cameras and webcams make it possible for an individual to instantly record and disseminate every inane second of their existence.  

Alongside the ever-increasing surveillance is the blanketing of mainstream television with shows offering heavily-edited versions of reality that often involve contests that humiliate and morally degrade their participants. These forms of “entertainment” confuse the boundaries between reality and fiction, and in so doing encourage an increasing number of youths to film themselves and others either participating in criminal activities, or in what are usually considered to be private acts. This has led to desensitisation, so that devices such as security cameras do not always deter, and can through the very fact that they are recording, spur some individuals to commit criminal acts in order to see their own image distributed throughout the media and on the web.  

There is scant interest in a serious debate on the impact caused by our fascination with self-documentation and the lack of an ethical framework for using new technology. While we smile for the camera, reticence is being destroyed by a “web-based virus”, wherein youth film and upload their “documentaries” to You-tube or MySpace for a Jerry Springer style dissemination of the participants/event. This not only trivialises real events by turning them into entertainment, but lowers inhibitions by keeping the camera between the act and the individual, thereby merging the unreality that the medium encourages into real-life situations. The recorded image of the individual becomes an avatar on the internet: a different being no longer considered real flesh and blood. This appears to be fuelling a desire to record criminal and de-humanising activities, such as the disturbing case of the teenage girl whose brutal rape was filmed and distributed by her five attackers in Sydney in 2007. This case signals not only an inability on the part of perpetrators to appreciate the reality of their situation, but a failure by the public to properly shake an apathy that appears to have arisen from over-exposure to intense surveillance.[i]  

Society has become comfortable with watching and being watched. Foucault’s theory of the panoptic state constantly watching its citizens, which causes them to self-regulate when confronted with the gaze of the “other” is both realised and destroyed in the current surfeit of surveillance. Yes, we are watched and some behaviours are self-regulated, however the modern individual has started to exhibit an unexpected disregard for the gaze.[ii] Coupled with this disregard is the disturbing justification for the controlling measures of surveillance data collection by government and corporate entities, – the belief that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about. This belief is being exploited by local and federal governments in order to strip our children and youths of their civil rights and liberties.  

In February 2008, the ABC’s children’s show Behind the News ran a story about Rockdale Council, where Barry Manilow is played “through loudspeakers near shops and buildings at night to scare off young people”.[iii] In the words of the Deputy Mayor, if you don’t behave in Rockdale and “respect other people’s rights” you can expect to be “hit with Barry Manilow”.[iv] As amusing and frankly frightening (Barry writes the songs that scare off more than youths) as such a suggestion sounds, there is a darker side to the story. Although Rockdale council was happy with Barry’s performance, other councils have reported patchy results when trialling music to discourage the presence of youths in public areas. Consequently, a number of Australian local councils are in the process of acquiring The Mosquito Teenage Deterrent[v] - a British invention that emits a high-pitched buzzing noise in a frequency only audible to people under twenty-five - despite reports that it can cause headaches and nausea if young people remain in areas where it is in use.  

In 2007 the Federal Government watchdog, the Australian National Council on Drugs, attracted strong parental and community support for its proposal to drug test High School students, but garnered no serious protest from students, and in South Australia, Anne Bressington’s suggestion that the latest technology be used to mouth swab Years 8 to 12 met with little comment or complaint from students.[vi] In 2008, two High Schools in New South Wales began trials with fingerprint security. When students were asked their opinions on being subjected to electronic fingerprinting in order to record attendances, most believed it was a good idea to stop wagging, some felt it was a waste of time; a minority voiced concerns about privacy issues.[vii]  

There is no doubt that security cameras help reduce crime and apprehend criminals; however recent increases in the number of criminal acts perpetrated ‘on film’ should make us wary of agreeing to further incursions into our privacy, and as with many measures already in place, devices such as The Mosquito, drug tests and digital fingerprinting are not always introduced to protect the innocent or capture the guilty. They can be a means to the end of population control through surveillance and ownership of information. Surveillance and control are always vulnerable to being used to deny targeted groups equal presence in our community, and should be treated with extreme caution. In the case of our children and youths, measures introduced under the guise of protection are in fact inculcating them to accept greater government intervention and less basic freedom.