CCTV cameras at home: Temporality experience of surveillance technology in family life

Abstract

Political and socioeconomic factors contribute to the popularity of surveillance camera use at home in China. This study investigates how CCTV (closed-circuit television) technology shapes family communication practices. Drawing on interviews and observations of 12 migrant parents, four left-behind children and four proximal caregivers, this article explores why people use new surveillance technology in the private home sphere to help parenting, and how family members cope with such surveillance. Children’s coping tactics include participation, disregard, escape and resistance. Through the temporalities framework, this article uncovers nuanced immediate, archival and predictive time experiences. The temporality experience of CCTV use is not traditional linear time co-presence, but video-based concentric three-circle time experience. It shifts interpersonal trust in family life into surveillance trust and interpersonal distrust, which requires familial negotiation and trust reconstruction.