Summary
Contents
Subject index
The digital age is also a surveillance age. Today, computerized systems protect and manage our everyday life; the increasing number of surveillance cameras in public places, the computerized loyalty systems of the retail sector, geo-localized smart–phone applications, or smart traffic and navigation systems. Surveillance is nothing fundamentally new, and yet more and more questions are being asked: • Who monitors whom, and how and why? • How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships? • How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday? • And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power? Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space. In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a ‘political geography of surveillance’.
Introduction: Governing the Everyday in the Digital Age
Introduction: Governing the Everyday in the Digital Age
Digital media work through the accumulation, transfer and analysis of data. The digital age also is a surveillance age, if we understand surveillance as ‘focused, systematic and routine practices and techniques of attention, for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon, 2007: 14; also see Murakami Wood et al., 2006). Thus by definition and by fact, surveillance reaches far beyond state-driven security schemes. Today, computerized systems that act as conduits for multiple, cross-cutting ways of gathering, transferring and analysing data control, protect and manage everyday life on many levels, serving security, administrative, commercial or political purposes. Think of the rapidly expanding use of RFID chips in tickets and goods, ...
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