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-- The lecture paper is now online! you can also download the pdf file --
Bio
David Lyon is a Professor
at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. David Lyon’s research, writing,
and teaching interests revolve around major social transformations in the
modern world. Questions of the information society, globalization, secularization,
surveillance, and postmodernity all feature prominently in his work.
Technology and society: The main currents of Lyon’s work concern the
emergence of so-called information societies in Europe, North America, and
Pacific Asia. Particular aspects of these include the social origins and consequences
of processing personal data -- that is, surveillance -- including digital,
video, biometric, and genomic data. Lyon is research director of an international
Surveillance
Project based at Queen’s, investigating surveillance, risk management,
and social ordering in global information societies.
Books on this theme include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance
Society, Polity / Blackwell 1994, Surveillance Society: Monitoring
Everyday Life, Open University Press 2001, and a projected third volume
on negotiating, resisting, and limiting surveillance. With Elia Zureik, David
Lyon co-edited Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy, Minnesota, 1996.
Surveillance as Social Sorting, edited by Lyon, will be published by
Routledge in 2002. In a related area Lyon is currently writing a book on the
sociology of cyberspace.
Post/Modernity: Research on new technologies and on contemporary religion
also raises questions about the mutating shape of modernity and about how
sociology could and should be done in these changing circumstances. Lyon produced
a short book on Postmodernity (Open University Press / Minnesota, 1994, revised
and expanded edition, 1999) which argues that the expansion of new media and
consumerism justifies rethinking modernity from these angles. This in turn
has implications for the ways that social theory and analysis is done.
David Lyon is a member of the editorial boards of Information Communication,
and Society, The American Behavioral Scientist, Information Technology, Education,
and Society, and Science and Christian Relief.