The culture of surveillance

Watching as a way of life

☙  Posté le 01-02-2018

From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But security and police agencies or internet and phone companies are not the only players. Surveillance is not only ‘done to us’ - it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing that ‘we have nothing to hide.’ Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data.

The electronic eye

The rise of surveillance society

☙  Posté le 01-02-1994

Every day precise details of our personal lives are collected, stored, retrieved, and processed within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments. Although no one may be spying, strangers do know intimate things about us, often without our knowing what they know, why they know it, or who shares this information. This is the surveillance society. In The Electronic Eye, David Lyon looks into our mediated way of life, where every transaction and phone call, border-crossing, vote, and application registers in some computer, to show how electronic surveillance influences social order in our day.