Living in the culture of surveillance. Prof. David Lyon on the Challenges of the Information Society

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For the past 30 years, David Lyon has focused his research and teaching interests on the main social transformations that have occurred in modern society – the emergence of the so-called ‘information society’, globalisation, secularisation and the postmodern condition – with particular concern for the issue of surveillance, which is the object of one of his seminal critiques on the illusions and the dangers of the information society (including mass surveillance) in the book “The Information Society: Issues and Illusions”.

Professor Lyon is Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada). In 2007,  he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association (Communication and Information Technology Section) and in 2008 he was appointed Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada. In 2016, he received an honorary doctorate during the annual Dies academicus at USI. The video of the awarding ceremony is available here: https://youtu.be/9IlkVONwSbQ

During his period (April-May 2017) as visiting professor at USI, Prof. Lyon gave a public speech on the topic of surveillance from the sociological perspective, seeking to raise the ethical, social and political issues that come with the processing of personal data (from airport security checks to effects of social organization, from video surveillance to registration and identification systems) in a world increasingly dependent on databases.