ABSTRACT
The steady rise of camera surveillance over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has resulted in the now common assertion that we live in a surveillance society. As the essays in this collection emphasize, an increasing array of social spaces from taxicabs (Doyle and Walby, this volume) to university campuses (Ferenbok and Clement, this volume) are subject to the surveillance camera’s gaze. Within such an environment, bodies and objects are continuously tracked and recorded by a diverse and disparate array of surveillance cameras. In addition to the rise in camera and other forms of surveillance practice, surveillance increasingly appears as a subject in film, television, video games, social networking sites, advertising and art (see Lippert and Wilkinson in this book for a discussion of Crime Stoppers advertising). In this way, surveillance has become a key feature of contemporary visual culture and of life more generally.
