Henry, Stadiums, and Video | Frontier Economy

Thierry Henry’s handball during the now infamous France-Ireland World Cup qualifying match, clearly caught on camera and later acknowledged by the player himself, has reignited in some quarters an often discussed call for the use of technology to aid referee decisions during soccer matches. But the real problem isn’t technology, and rather than being behind the times, soccer has actually been ahead of much of society.

Stadiums have always been places where authority over the field is on the hands of a specific individual or group, yet all events are also seen first-hand by the crowd. This combination is emotionally and socially very powerful — the Romans, who among other public institutions invented this form of public spectacle, were very well aware of this fact.

Cameras don’t change this equation, they just apply it elsewhere. TV cameras first, and later ubiquitous cellphones with cameras, have turned the entire world into a stadium. Just as every decision made by a referee is instantly evaluated by thousands or millions of people, every act by a cop, customer, salesperson, or anybody else is liable to be filmed, distributed, and discussed. The novelty of video scandals lies on how universal this self-surveillance by society is becoming, not in the fact that we do it.

Neither soccer associations nor businesses in general would need to invest much on technology in order to add video to their formal decision processes. If they let people submit them, every call by a referee would be within seconds both backed and attacked by thousands of cellphone clips shot from all angles in the stadium. The same goes for government offices, grocery stores, and schools. Customer satisfaction questionnaires, suggestion boxes, and formal quality assessments look a bit old-fashioned when you realize that most everybody they interact with has a camera on their pocket. Yet the same organization that spends much money trying to understand how the people it serves sees it, can also spend much money forbidding the use of cameras in its premises, or just not offering a way for this video feedback to reach it. This ‘buries’ most compromising videos… and makes sure that the really damaging ones will be seen by millions.

The problem, besides institutional inertia, is filtering and collating all the potential information. Few images show or can show the unbiased truth, and by now we are all, consciously or unconsciously, experienced image manipulators with an instinctive understanding of the power of editing to modify the implication and emotional impact of images. If soccer referees were to use in their decisions videos submitted by spectators, their calls would likely be more informed, but not clearer, and certainly not easier to make.

A government trying to catch corrupt officers, or a business manager assessing the quality of their customer service, has potentially much to gain by crowdsourcing this surveillance to the very people they are trying to help, people who often has technological tools and know-how that matches or surpasses those of the organizations. But crowdsourcing self-surveillance opens huge problems concerning fairness and proof; you can’t crowdsource management to the population at large any more than you can crowdsource the refereeing of a soccer match to the fans. We film what we care about, but we are seldom objective about it.

Yet attempting to ban cameras is already a losing proposition. Any mistaken decision or mistreatment, well-intentioned or not, is likely to end online. The world is now, in a way, a giant stadium, and every manager is refereeing a game. Unlike sports, where the playing field is perfectly enclosed and the rules are clear so it’s in principle possible to achieve a complete picture that everybody will agree on, business and society are too complex for that. If what the organization does matters to people, then sooner or later it’ll hear yelling from the grades, and know that videos of what just happened are being shown everywhere.

Nobody has figured out yet an organizational or technological adaptation to a world where every single customer has a camera and, potentially, a hit online TV show. But it’s definitely something worth thinking about.