Surveillance society : monitoring everyday life / David Lyon ; series edited by Tim May.

Includes bibliographic references and index.

Disappearing bodies. Reconfiguring time and space ; Blurring public and private ; Recombining technology and society --
Invisible frameworks. Commonalities and variations ; Surveillance diffused through society ; Social orchestration --
Leaky containers. Policing by surveillance ; Watching workers ; Covering consumers ; Deregulation and risk --
Surveillant sorting in the city. Social control in the city ; SimCity and urban realities ; Urban surveillance ; Under the camera ; SimCity and the real world --
Body parts and probes. The body from site to source ; Identity, identification and modernity ; Body surveillance technologies ; Body surveillance in different sectors ; Movement, action and risk --
Global data flows. Globalization and surveillance ; Global security : Comint ; Global security : controlling borders ; The world wide web of surveillance ; Globalized surveillance --
New directions in theory. Computers and modern surveillance ; Superpanopticon and hypersurveillance ; New surveillance in theory ; Returning the body --
The politics of surveillance. Regulative responses ; Mobilizing responses ; Resistance in context ; Why resistance is limited --
The future of surveillance. Modern and postmodern surveillance ; Toward a new approach ; Re-embodying persons.

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.