So where is the camera and who owns it?

Am currently hooked on watching "breaking bad" TV series.  End of fourth season and the main characters have execute an almost perfect plot.

It is almost perfect, except they forget they have been recorded on camera.  And they need to get rid of the evidence that implicates them.

Modern and post modern life is instantly recorded.  Or at least we should assume so.  The mobile conversations, the emails, the video footage, we leave our trail.  Something I already mentioned when I talked about our digital footprint in a previous blog post. 

Together with this trend about recording life, we are now assuming that everything needs evidence.  Before we argue for something, or we defend ourselves.  And this evidence is somehow a combination of digital footprint and other stuff.  So the writing in the napkin and the DNA in it still has some value and that can also be on the increase.

We, the humans, are not that perfect.  Our human camera, our memory, our word, our trust lies continuously in tatters.   We need to back it up.   

Bit of sad news to have to become mediators, prosecutors, detectives, lawyers and defendants.  In my academic world that is increasingly the case.  We cannot just assume students did all their work by themselves.  We have to check it with a plagiarism detection software.  Students on the other hand have their own devices to get information quickly.  Good for the good ones, and good for the not so good.  And we have to be careful with how we deal with important content (exams).  We have to be careful with allowing people to film our lectures.  

Why? Because we need to avoid fraud, foul play.  

And because in case of any dispute parties have to recur to evidence.  So we need to have it whilst others should not.  

It is a game of who owns the camera and who uses it and for what purposes.

I wonder if the same happens in other organisations where they do not have academics but employees, and they do not have students but customers.  I wonder if we have become trapped by this game of evidence and pressure.  

Who is to win this game? Is this a daily game, a minute by minute one? What purposes does it suit? 

Maybe the good news is that like Foucaultvian power, we have bit of freedom to protect ourselves and be savvy.  We still need good friends who know how to win disputes. And we also need good cameras.  

And we can be ethical in this game, whatever this means to us and whatever this happens to mean in a given moment and time.