Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life

The sequel to The Electronic Eye fills out the current picture by focusing on the everyday life dimensions of surveillance and on the quest for data on or from the body. The global picture also appears, with illustrations from North America, Europe and Asia in particular. Again, this book avoids the paranoid and the determinist, indicating some openings for critique and for hope. Lyon concludes that “it is the cultural grammar of today’s technologies that must be explored and contested. But we must look elsewhere for the means of confronting them than within the technologic of surveillance and its person-blind obsession with monitoring everyday life.”