Surveillance as Social Sorting

Surveillance as Social Sorting

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-19

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1134469047

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The book moves the debate beyond alarmist, 'Big Brother' treatments or complacent assumptions that once fair information principles are in place all is well, to a constructive and thought-provoking level.


Surveillance as Social Sorting

Surveillance as Social Sorting

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9780415278720

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Surveillance happens to all of us, everyday, as we walk beneath street cameras, swipe cards, surf the net. Agencies are using increasingly sophisticated computer systems - especially searchable databases - to keep tabs on us at home, work and play. Once the word surveillance was reserved for police activities and intelligence gathering, now it is an unavoidable feature of everyday life. Surveillance as Social Sorting proposes that surveillance is not simply a contemporary threat to individual freedom, but that, more insidiously, it is a powerful means of creating and reinforcing long-term social differences. As practiced today, it is actually a form of social sorting - a means of verifying identities but also of assessing risks and assigning worth. Questions of how categories are constructed therefore become significant ethical and political questions. Bringing together contributions from North America and Europe, Surveillance as Social Sorting offers an innovative approach to the interaction between societies and their technologies. It looks at a number of examples in depth and will be an appropriate source of reference for a wide variety of courses.


Sorting Daemons

Sorting Daemons

Author: Jan Allen

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13:

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"Digital information-gathering - in the form of images or data - increasingly affects our lives, tracking our movements, affiliations and consumer preferences. Such "sorting daemons" are used to control access to services, and to protect property and public order, while subtly reinforcing existing streams of influence and creating new ones." "Curated by Jan Allen with Sarah E. K. Smith, the exhibition Sorting Daemons complements the multi-faceted research project The New Transparency. The sixteen artists in this exhibition take measure of surveillance systems by producing works addressing their social, political and aesthetic dimensions. The publication features essays by Jan Allen, Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E. K. Smith expanding on the exhibition's theme through analysis of these and other landmark works of art." --Book Jacket.


Surveillance Society

Surveillance Society

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

Published: 2001-02-16

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0335232159

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In what ways does contemporary surveillance reinforce social divisions? How are police and consumer surveillance becoming more similar as they are automated? Are we forced to choose between classical and poststructuralist approaches in explaining surveillance? Why is surveillance both expanding globally and focusing more on the human body? Surveillance Society takes a post-privacy approach to surveillance with a fresh look at the relations between technology and society. Personal data is collected from us all the time, whether we know it or not, through identity numbers, camera images, or increasingly by other means such as fingerprint and retinal scans. This book examines the constant computer-based scrutiny of ordinary daily life for citizens and consumers as they participate in contemporary societies. It argues that to understand what is happening we have to go beyond Orwellian alarms and cries for more privacy to see how such surveillance also reinforces divisions by sorting people into social categories. The issues spill over narrow policy and legal boundaries to generate responses at several levels including local consumer groups, internet activism, and international social movements. In this fascinating study, sociologies of new technology and social theories of surveillance are illustrated with examples from North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia. David Lyon provides an invaluable text for undergraduate and postgraduate sociology courses both in social theory and in science, technology and society. It will also appeal much more widely, for example to those with an interest in politics, social control, human geography and public administration.


Surveillance Studies

Surveillance Studies

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2007-07-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0745635911

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The study of surveillance is more relevant than ever before. The fast growth of the field of surveillance studies reflects both the urgency of civil liberties and privacy questions in the war on terror era and the classical social science debates over the power of watching and classification, from Bentham to Foucault and beyond. In this overview, David Lyon, one of the pioneers of surveillance studies, fuses with aplomb classical debates and contemporary examples to provide the most accessible and up-to-date introduction to surveillance available. The book takes in surveillance studies in all its breadth, from local face-to-face oversight through technical developments in closed-circuit TV, radio frequency identification and biometrics to global trends that integrate surveillance systems internationally. Surveillance is understood in its ambiguity, from caring to controlling, and the role of visibility of the surveilled is taken as seriously as the powers of observing, classifying and judging. The book draws on international examples and on the insights of several disciplines; sociologists, political scientists and geographers will recognize key issues from their work here, but so will people from media, culture, organization, technology and policy studies. This illustrates the diverse strands of thought and critique available, while at the same time the book makes its own distinct contribution and offers tools for evaluating both surveillance trends and the theories that explain them. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to understand surveillance as a phenomenon and the tools for analysing it further, and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.


Surveillance After September 11

Surveillance After September 11

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2003-09-26

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780745631813

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Prominent among the quests for post-9/11 security are developments in surveillance, especially at national borders. These developments are not new, but many of them have been extended and intensified. The result? More and more people and populations are counted as "suspicious" and, at the same time, surveillance techniques become increasingly opaque and secretive. Lyon argues that in the aftermath of 9/11 there have been qualitative changes in the security climate: diverse databases containing personal information are being integrated; biometric identifiers, such as iris scans, are becoming more popular; consumer data are merged with those obtained for policing and intelligence, both nationally and across borders. This all contributes to the creation of ever-widening webs of surveillance. But these systems also sort people into categories for differential treatment, the most obvious case being that of racial profiling. This book assesses the consequences of these trends. Lyon argues that while extraordinary legal measures and high-tech systems are being adopted, promises made on their behalf - that terrorism can be prevented - are hard to justify. Furthermore, intensifying surveillance will have social consequences whose effects could be far-reaching: the undermining of social trust and of democratic participation.


Surveillance Studies

Surveillance Studies

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2007-07-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 074563592X

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The study of surveillance is more relevant than ever before. The fast growth of the field of surveillance studies reflects both the urgency of civil liberties and privacy questions in the war on terror era and the classical social science debates over the power of watching and classification, from Bentham to Foucault and beyond. In this overview, David Lyon, one of the pioneers of surveillance studies, fuses with aplomb classical debates and contemporary examples to provide the most accessible and up-to-date introduction to surveillance available. The book takes in surveillance studies in all its breadth, from local face-to-face oversight through technical developments in closed-circuit TV, radio frequency identification and biometrics to global trends that integrate surveillance systems internationally. Surveillance is understood in its ambiguity, from caring to controlling, and the role of visibility of the surveilled is taken as seriously as the powers of observing, classifying and judging. The book draws on international examples and on the insights of several disciplines; sociologists, political scientists and geographers will recognize key issues from their work here, but so will people from media, culture, organization, technology and policy studies. This illustrates the diverse strands of thought and critique available, while at the same time the book makes its own distinct contribution and offers tools for evaluating both surveillance trends and the theories that explain them. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to understand surveillance as a phenomenon and the tools for analysing it further, and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.


Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction

Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-07-25

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0192516981

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Surveillance permeates every aspect of our lives today. Once a more limited and often remote aspect of social life, today surveillance is central to political, economic, and everyday life. Every click on the keyboard, every call, text or email, every purchase, every contact with a doctor or the police or a government department, each time you walk under a video camera or pass through a security check, and in many other ways, you are recorded, identified, traced, and tracked. Who processes this free-flowing data, how, and with what consequences, is a critical question affecting everyone. This is not an alien conspiracy. It is the way today's digitally-dependent world works. Surveillance is not inherently good or bad but neither is it neutral. It urgently needs to be understood better because people's lives and life-chances depend on it. Today surveillance is central to doing business, meeting friends, organizing governance, maintaining security, and being entertained. Surveillance requires not just exploration and understanding but ethical guidance and political debate. How you get credit or welfare benefits or get on a no-fly list or are ranked as a consumer depends on surveillance. This Very Short Introduction investigates how surveillance makes people visible, how it grew to its present size and prevalence, how it came to rely on technologies of data-handling, and how it developed its own cultural features. Throughout, David Lyon also considers the ethics of surveillance, and explores its potential in prompting political struggles. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


The Culture of Surveillance

The Culture of Surveillance

Author: David Lyon

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-05-21

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1509515453

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From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But surveillance is not only 'done to us' – it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing we have nothing to hide. Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data. At the same time, we participate in surveillance in order to supervise children, monitor other road users, and safeguard our property. Social media allow us to keep tabs on others, as well as on ourselves. This is the culture of surveillance. This important book explores the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Its main focus is not high-tech, organized surveillance operations but our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance that range from the casual and careless to the focused and intentional. It insists that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance — from 'The Circle' or 'Black Mirror.' Surveillance culture, David Lyon argues, is not detached from the surveillance state, society and economy. It is informed by them. He reveals how the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalize surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.


Transparent Lives

Transparent Lives

Author: Colin J. Bennett

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1927356776

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Although most Canadians are familiar with surveillance cameras and airport security, relatively few are aware of the extent to which the potential for surveillance is now embedded in virtually every aspect of our lives. We cannot walk down a city street, register for a class, pay with a credit card, hop on an airplane, or make a telephone call without data being captured and processed. Where does such information go? Who makes use of it, and for what purpose? Is the loss of control over our personal information merely the price we pay for using social media and other forms of electronic communication, or should we be wary of systems that make us visible—and thus vulnerable—to others as never before? The work of a multidisciplinary research team, Transparent Lives explains why and how surveillance is expanding—mostly unchecked—into every facet of our lives. Through an investigation of the major ways in which both government and private sector organizations gather, monitor, analyze, and share information about ordinary citizens, the volume identifies nine key trends in the processing of personal data that together raise urgent questions of privacy and social justice. Intended not only to inform but to make a difference, the volume is deliberately aimed at a broad audience, including legislators and policymakers, journalists, civil liberties groups, educators, and, above all, the reading public. http://surveillanceincanada.org/