David Lyon: The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994)

Every day precise details of our personal lives are collected, stored, retrieved, and processed within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments. Although no one may be spying, strangers do know intimate things about us, often without our knowing what they know, why they know it, or who shares this information. This is the surveillance society. In The Electronic Eye, David Lyon looks into our mediated way of life, where every transaction and phone call, border-crossing, vote, and application registers in some computer, to show how electronic surveillance influences social order in our day.

The increasing impact of computers on modern societies is seen by some as very promising, but by others as menacing in the extreme. The Electronic Eye is a genuine contribution to the understanding of modern institutions in an era of globalizing electronic communication.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816625158, 9780816625154
Length 270 pages

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Saskia Sassen (ed.): Global Networks, Linked Cities (2002)

In her pioneering book The Global City, Saskia Sassen argued that certain cities in the postindustrial world have become central nodes in the new service economy, strategic sites for the acceleration of capital and information flows as well as spaces of increasing socio-economic polarization. One effect has been that such cities have gained in importance and power relative to nation-states.

In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished group of contributors expand on the author’s earlier work in a number of important ways, focusing on two key issues. First, they look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become “global” through the networks they participate in. Second, they investigate emerging global cities in the developing world-Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Beirut, the Dubai-Iran corridor, and Buenos Aires. They show how these globalizing zones are not only replicating many features of the top tier of global cities, but are also generating new socio-economic patterns as well. These new patterns of development promise to lead to significant changes in the structure of the global economy, as more and more cities worldwide are integrated into globalization’s circuitry.

Includes contributions from:Linda Garcia, Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink, Peter Taylor, David Smith, Michael Timberlake, Stephen Graham, Sueli Schiffer Ramos, Christoff Parnreiter, Felicity Gu, David Meyer, Pablo Ciccolella, Iliana Mignaqui, Eric Huybrechts, Ali Parsa. Also includes six maps.

Keywords and phrases
global cities, Mexico City, Mercosur, Buenos Aires, telematics, Sharjah, Beirut, Sao Paulo, Iran, Brazil, Bandar Abbas, maquiladora, Kish Island, optic fiber, Tokyo, nomic, Lujiazui, Abu Dhabi, Argentina

Publisher Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415931630, 9780415931632
368 pages

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Roland Barthes: Image Music Text (1977)

“These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” and “The Death of the Author” are also included.”

Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath
Published by Fontana Press, London, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1977
ISBN 0006861350

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