Reliance on surveillance technologies for authenticating identity has increased as remote non face-to-face interactions across distances and interactions with strangers have increased. The contemporary commercial state with its’ emphasis on consumption is inconceivable without the massive collection of personal data.Ī credentialed state, bureaucratically organized around the certification of identity, experience and competence is dependent on the collection of personal information. Government uses in turn have been supplemented (and on any quantitative scale likely overtaken) by contemporary private sector uses of surveillance at work, in the market place and in medical, banking and insurance settings. In the 19th and 20th centuries with the growth of the factory system, national and international economies, bureaucracy and the regulated and welfare states, the content of surveillance expanded yet again to the collection of detailed personal information in order to enhance productivity and commerce, to protect public health, to determine conformity with an ever-increasing number of laws and regulations and to determine eligibility for various welfare and intervention programs such as Social Security and the protection of children. Such forms were used for taxation, conscription, law enforcement, border control (both immigration and emigration), and later to determine citizenship, eligibility for democratic participation and in social planning. Forms such as an expanded census, police and other registries, identity documents and inspections appeared which blurred the line between direct political surveillance and a neutral (even in some ways) more benign, governance or administration. Over the next several centuries there was a gradual move to a “policed” society in which agents of the state and the economy came to exercise control over ever-wider social, geographical and temporal areas. In the 16th century, with the appearance and growth of the embryonic nation-state, which had both new needs and a developing capacity to gather and use information, political surveillance became increasingly important relative to religious surveillance. Religious organizations also kept basic records of births, marriages, baptisms and deaths. This involved the search for heretics, devils and witches, as well as the more routine policing of religious consciousness, rituals and rules (e.g., adultery and wedlock). In the 15th century religious surveillance was a powerful and dominant form. However the form, content and rules of surveillance vary considerably -from relying on informers, to intercepting smoke signals, to taking satellite photographs.
Seeking information about others (whether within, or beyond one’s group) is characteristic of all societies. To survive, individuals and groups engage in, and guard against, surveillance. Humans are curious and also seek to protect their informational borders. Information boundaries and contests are found in all societies and beyond that in all living systems. Each of these also involves surveillance.
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Consider for example a supervisor monitoring an employee’s productivity a doctor assessing the health of a patient a parent observing his child at play in the park or the driver of a speeding car asked to show her driver’s license. To varying degrees it is a property of any social system -from two friends to a workplace to government. Yet surveillance goes far beyond its’ popular association with crime and national security. These are instances of traditional surveillance -defined by the dictionary as, “close observation, especially of a suspected person”.
A member of a protest group is discovered to be a police informer.
This article offers a broad overview and introduction.Īn organized crime figure is sentenced to prison based on telephone wiretaps. Marx - Encyclopedia of Social Theory: Surveillance Surveillance and Societyīack to Main Page | References | Further ReadingĪ Belorussian-language translation by Mille EriksenĪ Swedish-language translation by Weronika PawlakĪ Czech-language translation by Barbora Lebedova
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