A Street View to a Kill

Apologies for that title; last Sunday weirdly had the theme of San Francisco. In the morning, I finished reading Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (finally - it's been in the waiting pile since 2000); stumbled across a documentary on City Lights bookstore on Radio 4 in the afternoon; and then dropped by the second half of A View to a Kill in the early evening, just in time to see the oddly unengaging car chase with the fire engine, having missed the nonsensical namedropping of the movie's title in the middle. Still, that's my favourite bit, not least because at that point Christopher Walken and Grace Jones are looking across San Francisco Bay and directly at Berkeley, which is where I got married. The rest of the film is best forgotten, though.

I begin with Northern California because I've spent the last couple of weeks e-trotting around the place on Google Maps Street View. Let me avoid equivocation on this point: I love Google Street View. At the beginning of February, and feeling more than usually nostalgic for my erstwhile hangouts in Woodland and Davis, California, I thought I'd look up a few features on the map and the satellite pictures, maybe see the roof of our old apartment or Raley's, the supermarket where the apricot pie is good and the fried chicken isn't. When Google Maps instead offered me the opportunity to, goddammit, effectively walk about the place with 360 degree vision, I was so surprised and delighted that I may have sworn out loud. Addiction followed quickly; I covered pretty much all of central Davis (although I was slightly disappointed that the University isn't covered, presumably because it's state property) and Woodland, before moving on to Norman, Oklahoma, and various other familiar places. Thus, the sudden surge of interest in Street View this week, with the launch of a limited UK version, seems like old news. I be surfin' the zeitgeist like a culture, um, surfer.

Inevitably, there has been criticism from privacy groups and some sections of the press. I caught sight of an article in Metro yesterday in which the story title screamed something about GOOGLE SPYWARE, which pushes the definition of spyware somewhat (would you have guessed that it's published by the Daily Mail? Well, yes). Google have, quite rightly, pointed out that all images are taken from the perspective of public property, and that you don't see any more than you would actually walking down the street. Critics cite the case of the man spotted going into a sex shop (again, the outrage connected with this leads me to suspect that Metro and the like may have their terms confused again - you can't actually buy sex in those places, guys. It's not like pick'n'mix) or images of accident victims. But what if I'd seen those people myself, in person, as I was walking in the street? Would it be wrong of me to have seen them? Would there be hysterical press coverage of "SPYWARE IN YOUR HEAD - These so-called 'eyes' give their users the ability to 'see' up to fifty metres..."

The problem lies in our changing conception of public and private. I'm currently reading Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, the central argument of which is that gradual social change since (roughly) the nineteenth century onwards has eroded our sense of acting and being in public, and of being involved with strangers in ways that aren't characterised by discourses of fear and suspicion. Put another way, we have become increasingly internalised; psychological rather than sociological, personalities rather than acts or relationships (and Sennett is particularly interesting on this with regard to sexuality; there's a connection here with Foucault's argument about the creation of the homosexual as a human type, rather than a set of acts, but I'm not going to go into that now). In terms of physical environment, public space has similarly become eroded; postmodern architecture tends to regard open space as something to be moved through, not experienced in itself. Public space is something we suffer in order to reach the goal of our private space; our homes, our office, or our cubicle. At best, there may be a few benches where you can eat a sandwich before getting back to Microsoft Excel.

I'm only near the beginning of the book, so can't say any more about how the argument develops (I'm hoping there's a car chase and a wisecracking chimp, though). But it seems to me that the Street View debate suggests that our public spaces have become privatised, or at least they have when they're up for grabs on the internet thanks to an international corporation (perhaps, then, privatised in both senses). When I'm walking in the street, I can't honestly expect to move through space entirely unregarded (indeed, if I walked through Newcastle shrieking "DON'T LOOK AT ME!", the opposite would probably happen. At least, for a second or two). Being in public means we're going to be involved in interactions with others, however brief or negligible, whether we like it or not, and no amount of MP3 earphone social-buffering is going to change that (incidentally - while in a number of malls in the US this December I noticed that absolutely nobody was audially isolated in this way; again, different uses of space). Likewise, if I appear in the background of someone's photograph of the high street, am I justified in punching them in the throat for capturing my image on their lightbox of tricks? Probably not.

Now hang on a minute, you're saying. It's all very well beating up the Daily Mail, but what you're suggesting here is justification for a CCTV nation that won't sit well with any self-respecting Independent reader. Who do you think you are - Noel Edmonds? But the crucial point is that whereas CCTV is interested in what people are doing right now, Street View isn't interested in either 'people' or 'right now'. There's no temporal dimension. You may be annoyed that you've been seen popping to Spar in your parachute pants on 27 July 2008, but it's hardly surveillance of your ongoing life, simply an enigmatic moment frozen for the world to see (and remember, they could have seen it for themselves anyway just by being there, they just couldn't afford the air fare). Maybe that's where some of the animus has come from; we're in there, but just as background. Maybe we don't like being second fiddle to a load of buildings and, you know, stuff. Most of the images I've seen seem to have been taken early in the morning, with hardly anyone else around. Maybe it's a training programme for the survivors of the apocalypse (who have, of course, already been chosen). Incidentally, looking for evidence of when the images were taken is also fun - the billboards outside cinemas provide valuable clues (Davis seems to have been mapped about a month after I left, and Woodland two months after that).

There are other implications, of course - I'm interested, for instance, in how this is going to impact on our ideas of travel, since long haul flights are now morally comparable with embezzlement of an orphanage, and if seeing a city online becomes in any way a replacement for actually seeing it in person - but that's another story for another time. I'm off (that is, staying here on my sofa) to gawp around Northern California some more.