Surveillance and monitoring technologies for security, recurrent in contemporary western societies, are connected to important social transformations, and to different themes studied in social sciences. Understood as power devices, surveillance cameras and new technologies such as biometrics embedded in passports, are no longer related to exemplary punishment as in foucaultian disciplinary society. They now relate to permission or denial of access, which displaces and dilutes punishment away to time and space of mobility or circulation. As part of an on going research, which has biometrics embedded in documents as one of its themes, this paper tracks some approaches that connect mobility, surveillance technologies and the movement of people worldwide with new representations and definitions of risk and uncertainty.
Surveillance; Technology; Power; Mobility; Social representation