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Making sense of this stylistic shift in surveillance, from top-down secret observation by authorities to “lateral surveillance” of the people by the people, requires a refreshed perspective, according to David Lyon, professor of sociology and director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

In a plenary lecture for this week’s Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Victoria — known as the Learneds — he calls it the shift from “fear” to “fun,” from surveillance as a security tool to a social media pastime.

Surveillance is often thought of in precisely targeted, individual terms, as in a police officer tracking a specific suspect. Now, however, so much of the “intensive, routine, systematic interest” in surveillance is on a much grander scale.

Data are aggregated to compare populations, to sort people so they can be treated differently.

“So in a sense you are already a suspect,” Prof. Lyon said. We all are, and most people seem enthusiastic about submitting themselves to these surveillance regimes, from personal updates online to customer loyalty programs.

“We’re going through a cultural change,” he said. “Big surveillance is still there, but we need to be aware of our own responses and our participation in surveillance.”

The social calculus is in flux, Prof. Lyon thinks, and the boundary between acceptable and intrusive surveillance is fluid and dynamic.

One problem is that the “fun surveillance” of social media can “domesticate,” as he puts it, other more nefarious forms we might want to challenge on civil liberties grounds.