Surveillance was a community activity — until we decoupled from communal living

Are we delegating our fears of harm to cameras and machines at the cost of true community?

Is surveillance making us forget what a community really means? That the definition of ‘community’ more than a gaggle with shared material interests, hobbies or commercial intent — but a group of people with mutually vested interests in each other’s wellbeing?

In the UK and US at least, especially city folks, don’t really know their neighbours . Certainly, many (not all) don’t know them well enough to invite them into their own family life; to check in most days even if it is a quick ‘good morning’; who share food with each other every week, swap childcare favours, offer lifts, do each others grocery errands, gardening…

Again some, not all — but the decoupling of family life — away from that of the proverbial village ideal, to a nucleated silo is more common in practice than it ever has been before.

Oddly, it’s a popular British meme (picture below) which sparked the thought: we don’t “keep an eye on each other” in the way that we used to. Specifically, we don’t look out for each other — a phrase which used to be synonymous with that said eye we kept for one another.