ABSTRACT
The book has forged a pathway in its conceptualisation of supervisory work. Camera operators oversee intricate and sophisticated camera circuitries that compress space-time discontinuities. Camera operators, although not scholastically trained in the biomechanics of human comportment, assess visualised behaviours according to experientially assimilated risk metrics. Empirical research has focused attention on how camera operators draw upon subjective filters biography and social identity to construct ecologies of normality. It has been argued that the distinctive positioning of camera operators as impotent overseers spawns affective atmospheres, especially feelings of excitement, impotence, merriment and distress. Reluctance among social inquirers to contact the daily operational realities of supervisory circuits and their wider circulations of supervision. CCTV camera operators have, as this excerpt exemplifies, little agency to avert their gaze. This often involves CCTV staff contacting police control, alerting them to a disturbance they are watching that, it felt, requires an urgent police presence.
