ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the proliferation of surveillance in contemporary societies. It considers some of the ways citizens and consumers are monitored and tracked by state and corporate surveillance systems, which increasingly merge and coalesce in what has been termed the ‘surveillant assemblage’. The chapter also considers bottom-up forms of surveillance or ‘sousveillance’, which reverse the gaze of dominant surveillance systems, including cases of resistance and challenge, such as citizen and activist-protestor use of social media and new digital technologies to hold the state, police and corporations to account for abuses of power and other forms of misconduct. A central premise of the chapter is that surveillance is a dynamic, relational process, involving power struggles, such that state surveillance and citizen counter-surveillance, for instance, cannot be analyzed separately, but must instead be seen as developing and evolving in tandem and via a series of interactive processes.