A kiss on camera

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile. In July, a TV station in Bowling Green, Kentucky reported on a controversy at Gig Harbor High School in Washington.

The dean of students said he saw two girls kissing. He checked the surveillance tape then shared what he saw with the parents of one of the girls. They then pulled her out of school, which then pulled the peninsula school district into a big controversy.

The TV station brought the issue home to Kentucky, because a number of schools in the county, from elementary school to high school, have surveillance cameras.

The situation serves as a good example of what is inevitable in a surveillance culture—everyone gets trapped by what the camera sees. Look at the issue from the surface and there’s an obvious question: Was the dean merely scandalized by seeing what he interpreted as “deviant” behavior? Would he have made the same parental report upon seeing a young man and a young woman kissing? What does it mean about him, (and more significantly, the level of tolerance in our culture) if he’s acted upon viewing the homosexual act and not the heterosexual act?

But play with some variables, and there are other troubling questions raised by the surveillance. What if the dean fiercely wanted to keep it a secret, but feared retribution should someone later realize that he had failed to say anything to the parents? The video evidence could reveal his inaction; it could become a mark on his record. Imagine another extreme—what if he was deeply religious and saw this as a way to punish the girls, less for violating school policy, and more as a way of asserting his morality? Or perhaps a more ambiguous situation—he just saw it has his duty to report it to the parents and is now shamed and sorry that he disrupted the lives of these students in a way that he will always regret. There is a great deal about what happened that day that just plain feels icky.

That’s the problem with a surveillance culture. Surely, one benefit of surveillance is greater knowledge, but the knowledge that it imparts doesn’t come with guidance on what to do with it. Secrets allow people to safely explore the world around them, make mistakes, and learn. But with constant surveillance of any environs, that exploration can be tragically denied, to the eventual detriment of everyone but the thoughtless camera.