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’.
Spatial Distancing and Separation
Spatial Distancing and Separation
Techno-mediated surveillance, fundamentally, works through distancing and separation (Marx, 1991). Whether we are talking about video surveillance, drones or satellites, sensors inbuilt in urban infrastructures or handheld self-tracking devices, the key point is that information is being recorded somewhere and subsequently transferred, accumulated and analysed elsewhere. What we see emerging here are different forms of geographically, socially and institutionally distributed agency with regard to who controls, processes, uses, etc., the data fused and interconnected in the increasingly complex ‘surveillant assemblages’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) that underpin everyday life (Klauser and Albrechtslund, 2014). Thus in contrast to traditional forms of social control, based on multisensory interactions and face-to-face contacts between co-present individuals or social groups, techno-mediated surveillance implies ...
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