Automating Vision: The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness

Automating Vision explores the rise of seeing machines through four case studies: facial recognition, drone vision, mobile and locative media and driverless cars. Proposing a conceptual lens of camera consciousness, which is drawn from the early visual anthropology of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Automating Vision accounts for the growing power and value of camera technologies and digital image processing.

Behind the smart camera devices examined throughout the book lies a set of increasingly integrated and automated technologies underpinned by artificial intelligence, machine learning and image processing. Seeing machines are now implicated in growing visual data markets and are supported by emerging layers of infrastructure that they coproduce. In this book, Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken address the social impacts, the disruptions and reconfigurations to existing digital media ecosystems, to urban environments and to mobility and social relations that result from the increasing automation of vision and explore how it might be possible to ensure a safe and equitable future as we learn to see with and negotiate the interventions of seeing machines.

This book will appeal to students and scholars in media, communication, cultural studies, sociology of media and science and technology studies.

More resources for the book can be found at https://www.anthonymccosker.com/automating-vision.

Anthony McCosker is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication and Deputy Director of the Social Innovation Research Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Rowan Wilken is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication and Principal Research Fellow in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.