This book is about explaining surveillance processes and practises in contemporary society. Surveillance studies is a relatively new multi-disciplinary enterprise the aims to understand who watches who, how the watched participate in and sometimes question their surveillance, why surveillance occurs, and with what effects. This book brings together some of the world's leading surveillance scholars to discuss the ‘why’ question. The field has been dominated since the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault, by the idea of panopticon and this book explores why this metaphor has been central in discussions of surveillance, what is fruitful in the panooptic approach and what are the possible approaches can throw better light on the phenomena in question. Since the advent of networked computer databases and especially since 9/11 questions of surveillance have come increasingly to the forefront of democratic political and policy debates in the global north and to an extent in the global South). Civil liberties democratic participation and privacy are some of the issues that are raised by these developments. But little progress can be made in responding to these issues without an adequate understanding of how, how well and whether or not surveillance works. This book explores the theoretical questions in a way that is grounded in and attuned to empirical realities.
Biography
David Lyon is Queen's Research Chair in the Sociology Department and Director of the Surveillance Project, at Queen's University, Ontario.
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was a revolutionary prison designed for its inmates to be observed by a central (but himself unseen) observer—a post for which the eminent philosopher, who hoped to reform as well as incarcerate prisoners, volunteered his own services—and the panopticon remains the central image of the expanding and indeed exploding subject of surveillance studies. Closed circuit television coverage makes us all subject to the gaze of the unseen observer, and the computers and mobile telephones at our disposal create further possibilities for surveillance.Should those possibilities be ignored, resisted, or analyzed and assessed in terms of their full implications? First, they to be made evident;and that is what this volume helps to do. David Lyon, a Canadian academic who has written widely on the implications of the development of the ‘surveillance society’, points to a conundrum:‘the more stringent and rigorous the panoptic regime, the more it generates active resistance, whereas the more soft and subtle the panoptic strategies, the more it produces the desired docile bodies.’This book considers a range of panoptic and post-panoptic devices, ranging from the maximum security prison to the self-imposed surveillance of ‘continuing professional development’ in the medical profession, in order to explore the implications of the surveillance society in greater depth.The result of an academic conference in Canada, it brings together an extraordinary range of ideas and is an absorbing if not an easy read. Peter Villiers
