Why Did Surveillance Cameras Become Banal?

A paper just published in the British Journal of Criminology by Ian Loader, Benjamin Goold (University of British Columbia) and Angélica Thumala (Catholic University Chile) asks why surveillance cameras have become an unnoticed and unremarkable feature of the English landscape – in short, banal. The paper is one of a series of articles based on a study of the social meanings of security consumption funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The abstract is reproduced below, and the full paper can be found here.

Why do certain security goods become banal (while others do not)? Under what conditions does banality occur and with what effects?  In this paper we answer these questions by examining the story of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in Britain. We consider the lessons to be learned from CCTV’s rapid – but puzzling - transformation from novelty to ubiquity, and what the banal properties of CCTV tell us about the social meanings of surveillance and security. We begin by revisiting and reinterpreting the historical process through which camera surveillance has diffused across the British landscape, focussing on the key developments that encoded CCTV in certain dominant meanings (around its effectiveness, for example) and pulled the cultural rug out from under alternative or oppositional discourses. Drawing upon interviews with those who produce and consume CCTV, we tease out and discuss the family of meanings that can lead one justifiably to describe CCTV as a banal good. We then examine some frontiers of this process and consider whether novel forms of camera surveillance (such as domestic CCTV systems) may press up against the limits of banality in ways that risk unsettling security practices whose social value and utility have come to be taken for granted. In conclusion, we reflect on some wider implications of banal security and its limits.