Surveillance Society

'The police are key players in the emergence of the so-called “surveillance society”. Evaluate this statement.What exactly is a ‘surveillance society’? The term is often used by the popular media to refer to the older more totalitarian notions of the ‘security state’ or Orwellian references to ‘Big Brother’ (Wood, 2009: 180). Surveillance can be defined as being a form of social control in which individuals are being monitored directly through several authorities e.g. The Government and the Police, with the idea that surveillance protects us in society by using a 'Big Brother ' ideology which is developed through social norms directing individuals cognition and behaviour.At the end of 2006, the UK was described by the Surveillance Studies Network as being 'the most surveilled country ' among the industrialized Western states with around 4.2 million CCTV surveillance cameras operating around Britain (McCahill; 2002), and is warned that we may be 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society '. (Richard Thomas; 2006)Cameras may not be a cause for concern when it comes to individual privacy, fairness, or accuracy; the real issue is government power. Cameras can be used as a tool for good to enforce good laws or for ill to enforce bad laws. With this idea cameras can be used like other policing tools, such as weapons police officers carry, the ability of police departments throughout the nation to gather and share data. We can accept this risk due to fact the tools are valuable and because they 've set up control systems that can help diminish the risk.In this essay I shall under-go the benefits that surveillance offers and also the issues to understand if our privacy is being breached or does it really intend on helping us as a society.The social theory of surveillance can be traced back to the utilitarian work of Jeremy Bentham (1791) and his vision of rational social control. He invented the concept ‘Panoptican’ a prison design that allowed for uninterrupted

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