ABSTRACT
This first chapter explores some of the key themes involved in “surveillance as social sorting.” The first four paragraphs state the argument in brief, before I suggest a number of ways in which social sorting has become central to surveillance. In what follows I look at some implications of surveillance as a routine occurrence of everyday life; focus on the emergent “coding” and “mobile” aspects of surveillance; and conclude by suggesting some fresh directions for surveillance studies in the early twenty-first century.1
