Surveillance as Social Sorting

<p>Surveillance happens to all of us everyday as we walk beneath street cameras swipe cards surf the net. Agencies are using increasingly sophisticated computer systems - especially searchable databases - to keep tabs on us at home work and play. Once the word surveillance was reserved for police activities and intelligence gathering now it is an unavoidable feature of everyday life.<br><br><em>Surveillance as Social Sorting</em> proposes that surveillance is not simply a contemporary threat to individual freedom but that more insidiously it is a powerful means of creating and reinforcing long-term social differences. As practiced today it is actually a form of social sorting - a means of verifying identities but also of assessing risks and assigning worth. Questions of how categories are constructed therefore become significant ethical and political questions.<br><br>Bringing together contributions from North America and Europe <em>Surveillance as Social Sorting</em> offers an innovative approach to the interaction between societies and their technologies. It looks at a number of examples in depth and will be an appropriate source of reference for a wide variety of courses.</p>