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> Part One: Orientations 1. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies 2. Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace 3. Biometrics and the Body as Information: Normative Issues of the Socio-technical Coding of the Body Part Two: Verifying Identities: Constituting Life-Chances 4. Electronic Identity Cards and Social Classification 5. Surveillance Creep in the Genetic Age 6. "Racial" Categories and Health Risks: Epidemiological Surveillance Among Canadian First Nations Part Three: Regulating Mobilities: Places and Spaces 7. Privacy and the Phenetic Urge: Geodemographics and the Changing Spatiality of Local Practice 8. People and Place: Patterns of Individual Identification within Intelligent Transportation Systems 9. Netscapes of Power: Convergence, Network Design, Walled Gardens, and other Strategies of Control in the Information Age Part Four: Targeting Trouble: Social Divisions 10. Categorizing the Workers: Electronic Surveillance and Social Ordering in the Call Centre 11. Private Security and Surveillance: From the "Dossier Society" to Database Networks 12. From Personal to Digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the Technological Meditation of Suspicion and Social Control