In the age of the cellphone camera, it’s nearly impossible to stumble across a random, noteworthy event in public without catching the flash of a lens out of the corner of your eye. There’s a good chance you may be one of the slew of amateur videographers in the crowd.

It hardly matters what happened, as long as it was even remotely tantalizing, controversial or god forbid, thought-provoking. Be it a gruesome car accident, an oh-so-brief nipple slip, or another unfortunate scene of police brutality — rest assured, within minutes the video will be uploaded to the Internet for all to see. Wait a few minutes more and this digital record of what transpired will have launched itself far out of the reach of those few people who were actually involved, crisscrossing the web into virality with virtually no signs of slowing down.

The combination of cellphone cameras and social networking is the driving force behind an experience-sharing engine that churns out thousands of potentially-viral videos daily. These videos typically wind up on YouTube, or some other less mainstream media streaming site. This process has become a commonplace phenomenon, thanks to the countless, unblinking eyes of Little Brother.

Like Orwell’s Big Brother, Little Brother is essentially an omnipresent entity, made up of a wide-ranging network of cameras and “telescreens.” Except instead of being mounted on billboards or living room walls, these all-seeing eyes are carried in the pockets of practically every person on the street. And rather than flowing one way, the information captured and passed on by Little Brother travels freely in all directions through cyberspace.

Yet as government surveillance on the streets and online ratchets up to new heights, there’s no denying that Big Brother himself is getting stronger by the day. Aided physically by militarized and short-tempered branches of law enforcement, constant government surveillance becomes a much more tangible threat to civil society every day.

Fortunately, unlike Orwell’s sinister elder sibling, Little Brother is not an avatar of the state that wields its observational power against the people. Instead, it’s the people who have collectively empowered themselves, using modern technology in the increasingly hostile struggle against oppressive governments worldwide.

The struggle between an oppressive surveillance state and a people empowered by social media and a million cellphone cameras was on stark display during Egypt’s revolution earlier this year. Indeed, in an effort to keep a lid on a simmering revolt, then-president Hosni Mubarak even resorted to shutting down the Internet in Egypt.

The clash between Big Brother and Little Brother has also spread to the West — as evidenced by the Occupy movement for the past several months. As police forces in the United States crack down on Occupy protesters, the Internet has been flooded by videos capturing the violence as it unfolds in high-definition.

The good news is that there has been a substantial backlash following the spread of some of the more heinous of these videos, especially those that broke through into the mainstream media. For instance, the Nov. 18 pepper-spraying of non-violent students at the University of California, Davis (see above). Following this attack, social news networks were ablaze with outcries denouncing the actions of these riot police, among others, with words like “barbaric” and “senseless” dominating headlines.

If governments and their law enforcement agencies lean on Big Brother to facilitate intelligence gathering on the public, then the public now relies on Little Brother to keep tabs on the government. Of course, Big Brother doesn’t take kindly to this new relationship dynamic. And he’s doing something about it.

The Internet is at risk of becoming mired in censorship, locked down by governments that fear the power of collective idea sharing. The Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill recently tabled in the U.S. Congress, is the first step toward the crippling of our ability to share content and ideas. By putting restrictions on networked free speech, the U.S. government would be laying the groundwork for future, more abject stifling of Little Brother’s effectiveness.

For the time being, however, the public’s perspective on cilvil injustice and government crackdowns is almost always seen through Little Brother’s eyes. And while this is a primarily positive force at the moment, considering journalistically filtered content is hardly an alternative, we should be wary of getting too comfortable. Little Brother could grow up into something we can no longer control.

Clips of non-violent student protesters being doused with pepper spray while they sit on the ground are shocking — but less shocking now than they would have been in the past. Oddly enough, it’s getting a lot harder to be disgusted by videos like this due to the sheer number of violent scenes we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. We should be alarmed by this numbing effect, and attempt to resist it if at all possible.

It could also be argued that Little Brother’s indiscriminate “peeping” into all our lives, regardless of whether or not it is relevant to anyone in particular, constitutes more of an invasion of privacy than even Big Brother’s constant surveillance. It’s true that instances of gross invasions of privacy perpetrated by webcam wielding marauders crop up more than occasionally. And sometimes the line between the public and private realm blurs unrecognizably, now more often than ever before.

These are legitimate concerns.

“The positives outweigh the negatives; Little Brother is keeping necessary tabs on out-of-control government!” is just a mutated version of the rationale behind Big Brother itself: that public surveillance is only in place to monitor the “bad apples,” lawbreaking criminals and thugs. Of course, this isn’t how it actually works. Great power must be accompanied by great responsibility, something that the collective masses and the government both lack, at times.

That said, as the influx of citizens resisting oppressive regimes around the world continues to grow, Little Brother’s watchful eyes are a welcome presence. The public needs a way to capture, preserve, share and discuss current events — especially those events surrounding the corruption of law enforcement and the violent crushing of peaceful protests. For now, cellphone cameras, YouTube and social networks fulfill this need. In the future, though, discretion and critical thinking will be crucial in preserving the small shred of privacy we have left.

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Graphic: Brianna Whitmore/The Sheaf