The Regulation of Gaze and Capture: New Media and the Image Economy

The increasing use of the body for embedding technology as well as the convergence of multiple features in mobile telephony have made image capture an important phenomenon that presents new ways to capture events and their constructs, which cast new forms of gaze into everyday life. The ways in which one captures and gazes has increasing ethical, legal and social implications for societies. The civilian gaze through mobile recording devices can be empowering in terms of holding authorities accountable, but it can equally debilitate societies by transgressing privacy and enabling new forms of voyeurism and deviance. In recognition of this, many governments and authorities are restricting the ways in which we capture and upload images. This paper looks at how this image economy is creating new ways of looking and how the new rules are, for different reasons, seeking to curb this architecture of capture.