Content area
Full text
Review of Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. London: Polity. 172pp. Paperback. US$22.95. ISBN: 9780745671734.
Early in the introduction to The Culture of Surveillance, David Lyon tells readers that it is time to put Nineteen Eighty-Four to one side. Although Orwell's iconic novel still resonates with contemporary fears about the dangers of state surveillance, Lyon suggests that the idea of Big Brother-a single entity watching and controlling us-is no longer an appropriate metaphor for surveillance in the twenty-first century. Instead, he argues that surveillance is not something that is simply done to us, but also something that we actively-and often enthusiastically-participate in. Where in the past the idea of the "surveillance state" or the "surveillance society" might have served as good descriptions of how surveillance functions in modern society, in his new book Lyon argues convincingly that surveillance is now best understood as form of culture: a collection of interconnecting norms, practices, and habits that inform our everyday lives and are continuously shifting as society-and the institutions and technologies of surveillance-change and transform around us.
Of course, our understanding of concepts such as the "surveillance state" and the "surveillance society" owes much to David Lyon's own work. Books such as The Electronic Eye (1994), Surveillance Society (2001), and Surveillance as Social Sorting (2003) have been enormously influential and have helped shape-if not define-the emergent field of surveillance studies. What is impressive about The Culture of Surveillance, however, is Lyon's willingness to move beyond his earlier work and to acknowledge that many of the concepts we have relied on to explain contemporary processes of surveillance-concepts he himself was instrumental in developing-are no longer entirely adequate or fit for purpose. Indeed, a recurrent theme in the book is the need to let go of past assumptions and embrace a more holistic, reflexive understanding of surveillance. As Lyon notes throughout The Culture of Surveillance, people experience and respond to different forms of surveillance in a multitude of ways, a fact that gives rise to what he refers to throughout the book as the "imaginaries and practices of surveillance culture" (5). Surveillance, Lyon stresses, is not simply a fact of life but also constantly in flux,...