What persists into postmodern conditions is an abiding infrastructural dependence on communication and information technologies. They are undoubtedly… - David Lyon

What a contrast with the lives of ordinary people at the start of twenty-first century! Today, everyday life is constantly monitored.

How long can surveillance theory ignore the implications of this? It seems entirely appropriate to add to the surveillance impetuses of the nation state, capitalism and bureaucracy, the imperatives of an implicit cultural commitment to omniperception. [...] The driving desire to dragnet yet more detailed data is both as old and as ominous as the aspiration to be "as God".

But the term surveillance society does have connotations that at least hint at possible negative consequences, in ways that unambiguously optimistic talk of "information societies" and "knowledge-based economies" does not. My point is rather that such societies are in part constituted by a surveillance dimension.