ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace in the advanced societies of the twenty-first century to talk about the ubiquity of surveillance (see Chapter 1). Whether or not we are aware of it, most of us are subject to a vast array of information gathering fuelled by an alleged ‘need to know’ about a range of interconnected life experiences related to our travel, home life, consumer behaviour, work record, leisure pursuits, criminal propensities or associations. In its many guises, surveillance may ascertain ‘who we are’ – to register and authenticate our identity; it may seek to monitor our location in a particular space (electronic or physical) and our reasons for being there; it may seek to ascertain our motives, both short and long term, as citizens, consumers, workers, and so on; it may inquire about our social status as credit worthy, as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ of goods and services. Surveillance also attempts to know our bodily movements through public, private, local, national and international space; it may be called upon to aid the prediction, pre-emption or containment of ‘risks’, behaviours and events (see Chapter 4). In short, surveillance renders aspects of social life visible for the purposes of managing stability in social relations. It appears as a central means to achieve a very broadly defined notion of ‘security’ in the twenty-first century through ‘the informatisation of life’ (Monahan and Wall, 2007, p. 154).
