Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life

Citation

Ball, K.S. (2001), "Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life", Information Technology & People, Vol. 14 No. 4, pp. 406-419. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2001.14.4.406.5

David Lyon’s Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life is a welcome and timely extension of his earlier book, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994). I remember reading the latter on its publication in 1994, when I was embarking upon a PhD about surveillance in organizations. At the time, I had not quite realised the significance of the growth in IS and their corresponding infrastructures in terms of surveillance and, on finishing the book, I did not leave the house unless I had to, paid for everything in cash, and flitted from bush to bush when shopping in my local high street, for several weeks afterwards. Now I am older, wiser (arguably), and more cynical, the extent to which citizens of the Western world are surveilled does not surprise me any more, but having worked with surveillance‐interested academics from across the spectrum of the social sciences, I am still left awestruck at the audacity some organizations have in the depth of personal data they attempt to collect and use to perpetuate themselves. After having read this book, the feeling remains.

The point is that as consumers, workers, and citizens, we leave an electronic trail of our movements and actions as we proceed through the spaces and places where we live, work and play. One of Lyon’s main arguments in The Electronic Eye was that any information society is a surveillance society (because of its capacity to collect and process personal data for the purposes of managing those whose data have been gathered), and the considerably shorter Surveillance Society pursues, augments and updates this further. While the former was a tour de force in terms of an articulation of the history, trends (which, at the time, included consumer, state and worker surveillance), and theories by which one could address the social world through a surveillance‐aware lens, the latter, in my view, represents a refinement and extension of prior arguments. Trends in surveillance are updated to include the alarming systematic use of biodata (hair strand, urine tests, DNA finger printing) in policing, the workplace and consumer monitoring; connectivity between different surveillance systems thanks to various “information superhighways” (for example, customer data in global airline alliances); and geodemographic and CCTV‐based surveillance in the city. Further, surveillance is conceptualised in a way which takes account of recent theoretical developments (for example, Bogard’s (1996) The Simulation of Surveillance and Gandy’s (1998) The Panoptic Sort), and is contemporary with developments in other areas of the social sciences (for example, a concern with embodiment and the body, and the heterogenization of the theorising of information technologies to include complex social and infrastructural elements). Anecdote, empirical evidence and theory are deftly interwoven to produce a highly readable yet intellectually challenging account which will be invaluable to students and academics in formulating research problems and understanding surveillance practice.

The basic explanatory point of the book is that surveillance has two faces: care and control. Few would deny the importance of deploying surveillance technologies to watch out for risks of theft, fraud, kidnapping, accidents and other mishaps; however, few would also deny the capability of surveillance technologies to assimilate and manage large amounts of categorised information about groups of people, which can then be used to identify and target them in a number of powerful ways. While this is hardly startling news (although it is sometimes not written through the book), four further themes emerge, which update the argument and explode the simplicity of this dialectic. Throughout, Lyon demonstrates that, in comparison to surveillance systems 20 years ago which were discrete entitites, today’s surveillance systems are increasingly linked to coordinate activities between individuals, organizations and nations in order that they account for, predict and assign aspects of risk and uncertainty in their operating environments. In doing so they generate, maintain and violate privacy to a greater degree, and thus play a more pervasive role in orchestrating power relations, than their predecessors. Rather than “big brother”, there are many “little brothers”, who are growing, associating and communicating at an ever‐quickening rate. Lyon warns about the control imperatives of this kind of “joined up” surveillance, and implores us not to focus upon technologies alone, but upon experiences of embodied persons embedded within sociotechnical surveillance networks if we are to redress the control/care balance.

The book itself is divided into three parts. The first, entitled “Surveillance societies”, sets the scene, articulating why the penetrative creep of surveillance technologies and practices is of mounting concern. This is divided into three chapters. Chapter one, “Disappearing bodies”, establishes a central problematic of the first world surveillance society, interpellating Giddensian discourse, which argues that, because of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), we are now more likely to “do things at a distance”. As we become present in a wider range of digitally mediated contexts, the need of surveillance‐systems to abstract and circulate information from the bodies of persons, locating, classifying and predicting their movement, is greater. Lyon calls these data “tokens of trust” (e.g. an ID number) which authenticate our identities in the absence of face‐to‐face interaction, and the solid handshake. The corollaries of this are, first, that we actively collude in our own surveillance, and, second, in doing so, contribute to the overall movement towards greater intensification of personal surveillance. This point is continued in chapter 2, “Invisible frameworks”, where the issue of the systematic and intense deployment of surveillance‐capable technologies across a range of societies from Canada, USA, Europe and the Far East is addressed. Here, several national campaigns to develop digital infrastructures which support surveillance activities are identified, and their diffusion through societies is discussed. Lyon is careful to avoid technological determinism in describing the relationship of these infrastructures with society, employing the first of a number of similes and metaphors to describe it: “social orchestration”. The metaphor describes an overall direction (from the conductor), but the minutiae of the music varies with each player and section because of interpretation, improvisation, and so on. I am somewhat sceptical as to what type of music he thinks the orchestra might be playing. The metaphor fits with avant garde pieces, which have unscored improvisational sections, but less so with classical music, which is a highly pre‐determined affair, judged on the interpretive accuracy and virtuosity of the performance, according to the conductor’s interpretation of the score. Suffice it to say, that the main point of the chapter was to establish that there are many agencies involved in surveillance, it differs between societies but has linking characteristics associated with the role of the nation state and bureaucracy. Diffuse contexts for surveillance are discussed further in chapter three, “Leaky containers”. Here, Lyon highlights how today’s surveillance systems are more interconnected than their predecessors due to technological, cultural‐social and political‐economic development which permits the flow of personal data between sectors. A number of blurred boundaries from hitherto discrete surveillance scenarios are described. In the UK, for example, employers will soon be able to check on the background of their employees using the Central Criminal Records Bureau. So the scene is set. Surveillance systems, and their connected infrastructures, are silently developing the social order across the industrialised world. By interacting with these systems, via our mobile phones, e‐mails, bar codes, loyalty and store cards, we are colluding in our own surveillance, surveillance systems are co‐constructed and recursively developed. Examples of how this manifests in daily life are explained in part two.

Part two is entitled “The spread of surveillance”, where three chapters examine intensified surveillance domains in more detail. In this section, the roles of imagined futures for simulated surveillance start to feature more heavily in the discussion. Chapter four looks at surveillance in cities; chapter five, the surveillance of bodies and six, the globalisation of data flows. In chapter four, Lyon compares recent accounts of surveillance in the city with the computer game “SimCity”, which simulates a city where the player is supposed to design it to control the behaviour of the “sims” (its inhabitants), showing how some cities use simulation technology to examine life “on the ground”. In this chapter, CCTV technology networks for traffic and crime control, smart devices for the home which relay information to suppliers, geodemographics for spatial classification, business development, and marketing, are examined. Drawing largely on the work of British geographer Steven Graham, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, and a rich use of examples, a picture is painted of cities where flows of resources are monitored and modelled. Cameras which identify “deviant” behaviour in subways through posture and movement, and fully‐automated toll roads, which read a transponder on your windscreen and charge the toll to your credit card, are all a reality in different parts of the world. In chapter six, the film, “Gattaca” posits an extreme position in relation to the intensified surveillance of the body. The debate arises in relation to how organizations and the state now use body parts to document and authenticate individual identity. Passwords and pin numbers may be used by others, but we cannot swap retinas, iris’s, DNA or fingerprints. Ironically, this type of surveillance still makes the whole body invisible, and even these technologies are not infallible. Citing examples of “identity theft”, false accusations of athletes following drug tests, and atopic dermatitis (where the skin blisters to erode finger prints) problems with these technologies are myriad. In spite of this, research such as the human genome project is afforded great credence and explanatory power in certain circles, and applications of body surveillance in local organizational sites (e.g. palm scanning at the Olympic Village, Atlanta, in 1996) are reported with much hype. Finally, when considering the globalisation of information flow, Lyon addresses, anecdotally and empirically, how transnational practices have facilitated the monitoring of workers, citizens and consumers across borders. Of particular interest is the analysis of global consumer surveillance. Using Sklair’s (1995) analysis of global systems, treats consumerism as a global culture‐ideology of transnational capitalism. Thus, while the mass media seek to create lifestyles in consumer culture, capital, through data collection on their consumers and trading in consumer information, create the technologies which reinforce and perpetuate this ideology. Consumers are then sorted into consumption categories: the result is that those who consume more and more often are more tightly classified and offered products which are tailored to their needs. Those who do not are ignored. Thus past consumption patterns influence future life chances. Observations are also made concerning the new connectedness of systems which govern border policing, international security and communications: any communication outside the UK‐USA alliance of English‐speaking nations’ communications networks, invariably has to pass through internet hubs in the USA, so the US Government is busy developing “sniffer software” to intercept any “interesting” foreign communications. Thus, part two, gleaned from media, anecdotal and academic publications, maps world surveillance trends in some detail. But what does this all mean? This is addressed in part three.

Part three, entitled “Surveillance scenarios”, discusses how surveillance might be theorised, politicised, and examines what surveillance futures might entail. The first chapter (chapter 7) addresses “new directions in theory” and contains the funniest line in the book (upon mentioning postmodernism, Lyon begs the reader not to put the book down!). The placing of a theory chapter so close to the end of a book seems unusual, but I feel that this is entirely appropriate in this instance. The basic problem of any theory of surveillance is that it should account for the growth of surveillance systems and infrastructures, but also explain lived experience under surveillance. A further problem with theorising surveillance processes is that surveillance studies itself is a highly interdisciplinary area (featuring cultural studies alongside electrical engineering, for example), and is still in its infancy. Thus, to privilege one set of theories over another to elicit a tight theoretical framework at this stage would be extremely difficult and marginalizing of groups of academics whose contribution to an understanding of the whole is important. For example, it is vital that electrical engineers who are designing CCTV cameras to recognise “normal” and “abnormal” behaviour in tube stations, engage with sociologists and political theorists, whose prime concern is personal privacy and social justice. Thus, the placing of a theory chapter at this point is consistent with a work which seeks to highlight the diversity of issues in surveillance studies, and is useful for those wanting to use it as a springboard in order to theorise it for themselves. This is also reflected in the diversity of theoretical influences throughout. DeCerteau, Beck, Deleuze, Weber and Castells all feature, but in this section, Lyon begins with the surprising position that Foucaultian and Baudrillardian perspectives on surveillance are not that incompatible. Lyon demonstrates this using Poster’s (1990) “databases as text” argument, which is an extension of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977). Put briefly, Poster argues that electronic databases extend writing as a classificatory system of individuals. The idea of surveillance which aims to individuate populations is a very modern one. But databases are paradoxical in this respect. Through their language‐based electronic classifications of individual identity, and the collection of data upon individuals in multiple digitally‐mediated contexts, they have the effect of assigning the person as many identities as there are databases in which they feature, thus decentring them to a multiplicity of virtual locations. The use of these identities to model “reality” turns the whole assemblage into a simulated hyperreality. Hey presto!We are postmodern. However, the earlier quip on postmodern approaches belies Lyon’s ultimate rejection of Bogard’s Baudrillardian theory of hyper‐surveillance, because, in accordance with his earlier arguments, it flattens the social, ignores embodied persons, and thus depoliticises the surveillance act. In the end, because of the richness and diversity of research which examines surveillance, Lyon calls for “disciplined eclecticism” in its theorisation, but urges for the following: that embodied personhood be kept central; that cultural obsessions with “omniperception” be explored; and that theories and politics of surveillance be closely linked. Theory must take account of resistance.

This is the subject matter of chapter 8, whose main observation is the lack of consistent and linked action against widespread surveillance practices. This is not to say that it does not occur, however, as there have been various successful attempts to regulate information usage in a number of contexts through data protection laws; through voluntary codes and guidelines for groups of practitioners (such as the Direct Marketing Association in Canada); establishing legal property rights over personal information; and reinforcing this with technology. However, these measures mainly exist to protect personal privacy: larger scale action which emphasises how surveillance systems affect social justice, social orders and the distribution of resources and power is not in evidence. Non‐governmental organizations such as Statewatch and Privacy International still focus their action on data protection laws and personal privacy. Nevertheless, surveillance occurs, and always has occurred where personal information is gathered and applied to the management of populations and their activities. The fact that it exists is not the contentious issue here. The politics of any surveillance system, whether it is “good” or “evil”, whether it “cares” or “controls”, is dependent upon its contextual or cultural focus. Whether it wants to maximize the gathering and application of information at any cost, or whether surveillants observe that any data they collect is voluntarily given, only used for the purpose it was originally collected and are responsible about the material social orders that they produce, and the life chances that they determine. Sadly, until now, the former is the dominant approach, so what would the alternatives be? In the final chapter, “The future of surveillance”, and in a consistently modest style, Lyon avoids positing concrete alternative future dystopias, but rather couches his predictions in the modern/postmodern interplay developed earlier in chapter 7. Both traditional and new surveillance practices are concerned with gaining control through the exercise of codes, contextualised in specific settings, which are put into motion by those in pursuit of a particular moral and social order. But behind them we find market values, surveillance power located in myriad agencies, which are frequently answerable to commercial organizations, such as insurance companies and other transnationals, rather than the state. So we return to one of the first points of the book: that surveillance has two faces. If we focus upon control, we forget the human “where humans are seen as embodied persons, where the face‐to‐face is privileged over the abstract communication, justice over automated classification, and communal involvement over technical imperatives, there are hints of hope” (p. 154). So, the message is, be aware of surveillance in your practice, theorise responsibly and heterogeneically, and never respond to consumer surveys … outwit the little brothers before they grow up!Here’s to hoping.