Article Post: "Surveillance, Power, and Everyday Life" by David Lyon

David Lyon is a professor of Sociology at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. He is also director of the Surveillance Studies Center at this university. He's published and co-published other books on surveillance such as Surveillance Studies: An Overview and Liquid Surveillance with Zygmunt Bauman. David Lyon's essay "Surveillance, Power, and Everyday Life" is a chapter in a larger book called The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies which is a compilation of works of many authors about the challenges that ICTs present. It was published in the year of 2009 which was when satellite navigation on phones, twitter, real time search engines, etc. all came into place. ICTs were booming and continuing to develop.

With the advancing technology, David Lyon points out how surveillance is beginning to grow and evolve around ICTs as well. Surveillance that once could only be seen or heard through first hand monitoring could now be viewed on security cameras or through tapped phone wires. Even more than typical surveillance though, the everyday person is being watched and documented based off unlimited means. Loyalty cards at stores can now track how often you've visited the store and which items you are more prone to buying. Search engines can now document your searches. Cell phones are given to children to "know where they are." Online usage of banking, shopping, and sharing are all being tracked. Lyon goes on to explain that all of this documented information is proceeding to be used for institutional surveillance rather than individual surveillance. Instead of surveillance being used in an exclusionary way, for suspects of terrorism or crime, surveillance is now classifying and inspecting every single person. This brought Lyon to question whether this has led to the end of privacy. He argues that in order to deflect from a singular focus of privacy, since there are many opinions on the matter, it's important to view surveillance as social sorting. He claims that it's almost human to "classify." People group certain people, behaviors, looks, facts, etc, into larger more broad categories. However with the invention of ICTs and specifically computers, it has become a major industry to classify people and that is where the problem comes in. Data in one web browser isn't subject to only that browser; personal data gets circulated in order to classify and suddenly we're been profiled and placed into a category based on assumptions. Certain people get placed on "no fly" lists at airports, people get denied loans at banks, etc, and sometimes the cause is because you've been unknowingly been placed into one of these categories through the auto-classification that's been done.

Since this particular work of David Lyon was a chapter in a larger book with other author's writings, it was hard to find any responses to this particular writing of Lyon's. However, during my search about Lyon and his other works, there were many good reviews that I found from scientific journals and professors from distinguished universities such as MIT and University of Toronto about Lyon's other publication Surveillance Studies: An Overview.

Research links:

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/freedom-not-fear-david-lyon-contemporary-surveillance

2. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548798.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199548798

3. http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745635910#authorinfo

Related Articles:

1. Stever, J. A. "SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society." Choice 51.1 (2013): 164. ProQuest. Web. 21 Oct. 2014

2. Ball, Kirstie S. "Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life." Information Technology & People 14.4 (2001): 414-9.ProQuest. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

3. Macrakis, Kristie. "Supervision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society." Technology and Culture 55.2 (2014): 515-6.ProQuest. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.