Surveillance as Social Sorting - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415278732 ISBN 13: 9780415278737

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Like a high quality electromagnet, David Lyon has attracted a group of authors who are producing some the best thinking and writing about privacy and surveillance being published these days... By bringing GIS, Intelligent Transportation Systems and applications of genetic profiling into the same conversation about identity and identification, Lyon has advanced our understanding of the importance of surveillance and social sorting. By including work that examines the nature of contradictions and assesses the evolving character of resistance, Lyon has given us reason to join the struggle. We are, once again, pleased to be in his debt."
-Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Herbert I. Schiller Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "The Panoptic Sort

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0415278732
• ISBN 13: 9780415278737
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302
• Editor: Lyon David