This module will begin by looking at the growth of the nation state and early forms of surveillance and how these have been challenged, refined and adapted over time. We will look at the Enlightenment and the corresponding development of civil society, notions of individual liberty and freedoms that accompanied the bourgeois revolutions of Western Europe and whether or not these ideals have been compromised with the growth of industrial capitalist society and the need for work discipline, time management and control. Within our analysis of organisational society we will look at models of rationalisation, bureaucratisation, networking and the supposed rise of `big brother’ and `total institutions’ drawing on the work of Weber, Foucault, Goffman, Heidegger, Castells, Lyons and others. This will then lead into an analysis of traditional and new forms of surveillance drawing out the key techniques and technologies used and the social and cultural consequences that flow from them. The work of Beck and Giddens on `risk society’ and Bauman on the fluidity and indeterminacy of contemporary social life along with the work of Furedi on the `culture of fear’ will provide useful heuristics that will enable us to develop a critical discourse of surveillant practice. The psychological impact of surveillance on individual identity and interaction will be explored in depth along with the debates on technological determinism and humanism, social networking, living on-line and embedded computing. The implications of the recording of practically all human interactions and the consequent inability of the social sphere to `forget’ will be examined in detail in the latter part of the module and the hypothesis that increasingly intense surveillance is contributing to the metastasis of neurosis will be explored and debated in class.