Streetwise

This Google Street View thingy is getting more and more Gibsonian by the minute. And by 'Gibsonian' I don't mean that protean novel Neuromancer either. It's much more of an Idoru, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country sort of an affair; an unseemly artificiality that seems like a natural technological innovation. But what are we seeing on 'street view' exactly? I'm not sure. It makes me think of the way the top-down satellite imagery is always out of sync with the present in which you view it. This means, for example, that the dead can walk again!

What I find curious about this are the parallel events, like the guy who got arrested for using a free wi-fi network because a self-absorbed hairdresser suspected him of stalking her when he parked outside the café across the street offering free wi-fi and pulled out his laptop. So on the one hand we have a weird nexus of surveillance culture 'innocently' parading under Google's banners where at the same time we have people becoming suspicious of those who are not equally nervous of surveillance.

Obviously we are simply not alienated enough from each other... Bring back that polite edifice of congenial civility!