Internet and Surveillance

'With its careful balance between theoretical and empirical, critical and relatively neutral perspectives on the internet and surveillance, this excellent collection helps to define the challenges we face in understanding and coming to terms with social media and the still evolving network environment. Its impressive scope, accomplished through contributions from an international community of scholars updates the familiar, while setting the ground upon which future assessments of exploitation, alienation and resistance will have to begin once again.' – Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

'The spread of digital technologies presents the opportunity of people accessing and producing information more readily than ever before, a liberating potential. However, it also means that each and every one of us leaves a digital trace whenever we use credit cards, undertake a Google search, or pass through card-operated barriers. The opportunities for harvesting information – for using surveillance to order and organise people and places – is unprecedented. From the compelling reflections of pioneering analyst Thomas Mathieson, through sophisticated theoretical observations from the likes of Christian Fuchs and David Lyon, to richly-detailed case studies, this is a volume to savoured.'– Professor Frank Webster, Head of Department of Sociology, City University London and author of Theories of the Information Society, 3rd edition 2006