It seems each week we dive into another layer of what ‘live’ means- this week’s reading delves into liveness from a surveillance perspective; more specifically CCTV cameras.

What I found interesting about the first half of the Scanell ( 2013, pg 2 ) reading was that he mentioned that the past would not prevail if it were not for recording events through writing or narration. We would not know how Jesus spread his faith if it were not for the written records of his followers. He then mentions that the advancement of visual and audio recordings have managed to capture these same historical events more accurately. I like to relate the era of pre-technology ( ie, the time of Jesus ) to a game of chinese whispers. At the start of the game, when the sentence is created and then passed on to the first person, it is so clear and true to what the sentence was originally. As it is passed down along the line to several people, the sentence becomes distorted and often times wildly inaccurate. Similarly, stories and events during the pre-technology era depended on it’s spread through word-of-mouth narration or written records. Often when modern scholars review these same stories/events we question how credible or even how accurate it is. Scanell then explains the beauty of the audio and visual recording era- how we see events that happened before in all its true form- it is live again once we hit that button ( Scanell, 2013 )

He then mentions about why we might not consider CCTV or surveillance footage as something live even though it most certainly is recording and relaying something that is happening in real time. It is simply not considered as live because it is not something watchable, it merely serves a purpose when something has happened and we want to find out exactly what ( ie, a murder or crime was committed and the killer was caught on CCTV footage ). CCTV footage has ” no motive, no intentionality, no concern in what it ‘blindly’ and ‘unthinkingly’ records” (Scanell, 2013 ).

This, specifically, got me thinking about time lapse videos and whether it is considered similarly to CCTV footage. Time lapse videos are often left in a specific spot for long amounts of time and use to capture something progressfully. It is left on it’s own without a human operator, similar to a CCTV camera. Although I couldn’t find any scholarly articles to shed some light on this argument, I have come to a conclusion that because time lapses are often used by professional photographers or video-makers to capture a sunset or a busy street often to signify the change in scenery or the progression of time, then therefore it has a motive, intentionality and some form of concern to what it is recording and therefore cannot be compared to a surveillance camera/footage.

References:

Scanell P, 2013, Television and the meaning of ‘live’: An enquiry into the human situation, EBSCO Publishing, pg 93-106.