Everyday Surveillance

When we think of surveillance in our society, we usually imagine “Big Brother” scenarios with the government tracking our every move. The actual surveillance of our everyday lives is much more subtle, however, and may be more insidious. William G. Staples shows how our lives are tracked by both public and private organizations—sometimes with our consent, and sometimes without—through our internet use, cell phones, public video cameras, credit cards, license plates, shopping habits, and more. Everyday Surveillance is a provocative exploration of the myriad ways we are watched each day, and how this surveillance shapes our lives.Thoroughly revised, the second edition considers new topics, such as the rise of social media, and updates research throughout. Everyday Surveillance introduces students to concepts of social control and incites classroom discussion about how surveillance impacts the ways we understand people and our lives at home, work, school, or in the community.

This insightful and wonderfully accessible book shows how surveillance has radically transformed just about every aspect of social life. Whether at home, school, work, or in online worlds, surveillance defines and mediates our experiences. This completely revised edition of Everyday Surveillance is the perfect guide for making sense of these changes and their consequences., George Orwell was wrong. The modern problem of surveillance isn’t Big Brother but the thousands upon thousands of “Tiny Brothers” that record and track our daily existence. William Staples offers a compelling account of the rise of private surveillance — complementing but also complicating the watchful eye of the State — and the equanimity with which this has been greeted by the public., William Staples blends sophisticated social theorizing with a keen eye for the minute ways that surveillance touches our day-to-day lives. In the process he brings to light the often otherwise invisible powers of contemporary monitoring practices., William Staples offers an engaging, succinct, contemporary introduction to the micro-management of ever more areas of daily life through surveillance technology. While attuned to the depths of change, he does not lose sight of what remains unchanged. Ideal for a range of beginning social science courses!, Through incisive analysis, Everyday Surveillance charts the various ways that surveillance shapes the postmodern moment: from the routinized gathering of data by “smart” technologies when we shop, work, travel, or protest, to new categories of punishment that blur the line between incarceration and freedom – where those under house arrest are subject to “participatory monitoring” with the expectation that they come to supervise themselves. Through interviews and observations, Staples offers a “sociology of the postmodern” that is a wide-ranging, historically grounded, and theoretically informed engagement with the techniques of surveillance and social control.

William G. Staples is professor of sociology and founding director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas. He is author or editor of several books, including the Encyclopedia of Privacy and Castles of Our Consciousness, both CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, and Power, Profits, and Patriarchy, winner of an American Sociological Association Section Book Award.