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’.
The Socio-Spatial Implications of Surveillance
The third analytical axis that cuts across my study of the surveillance–space nexus relates to the socio-spatial implications of surveillance. How does the contemporary proliferation and intensification of surveillance shape space in its materialities, meanings and social uses? What impact does surveillance have on the practices, perceptions and experiences of space? There are three main sub-themes to highlight.
The first sub-theme, entitled ‘distancing and separation’, is connected with the multiplication of socio-technical mediations implied by IT-based forms of surveillance. Traditionally, social control takes place as a result of the concurrent presence and mutual, face-to-face control of those occupying the same space at the same time (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Techno-mediated surveillance, in contrast, relies on numerous ...
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