I tend to follow what’s called the “Narrative Paradigm” in thinking that humans are fundamentally story-telling creatures. I just found out that term existed and that somebody with more intellectual clout than me made it up, so I’m going for it. Narratology is essentially the study and theory of narratives, their structural elements and their effects on perception. Or at least that’s my version digested from the Wikipedia article, which kind of meanders and which I don’t know enough about to improve upon or maybe I would.

Telling a story is the essence of theatre: creating in the perceptual field of the audience a sensation of meaningful sequential events. The sets, props, costumes and acting in theatre is all designed to enhance that, to make that both more concrete and more evocative.

Surveillance is a sort of omni-present theatre writ large on a societal scale. I think Grant Morrison may have talked about this somewhere: that the more cameras go up in front of people’s faces, the more they’re going to start acting like, well… actors. Surveillance is theatre in that it forces people to perform (”for the cameras” - nevermind whoever’s watching or not watching), but it becomes a form of legal story-telling when a subset of surveilled moments is selected and edited in order to present evidence for or against a crime.

The courtroom, itself, is a place where stories go to battle in the [community of meaning]. Multiple variations of one particular narrative (made up of many surveilled theatre moments, activities committed when you know someone’s watching, or want to put on a good show - “what’s my motivation here?”) being presented and weighed against one another, and then ultimately selected or thrown out by virtue of arbiters or agents of meaning selection on behalf of a community.

I haven’t seen it but I think there’s a Robin Williams movie that sort of deals with this: that everyone’s life is surveilled completely and that at death, the footage is edited to make a memorial real. I don’t know how the movie talks these things through via the story format, but it makes me wonder things apropos to our given situation and the situation in which we’ll increasingly find ourselves in the years to come: who owns the rough footage of your life? Who gets to do the editing and how do they pick out what kind of story to tell about you out of all possible narrative strandes available?