Understanding Surveillance and Making a Difference
This book advances a new view of information and surveillance practices, as well as their related agencies, politics, and powers. Drawing on case studies, the author crafts a new methodology of studying information life cycles which will help us navigate information regimes today.

Information matters to us. Whether recorded, recoded, or unregistered, information co-shapes our present and our becoming.

This book advances new views on information and surveillance practices. Starting with a methodology for studying the liveliness of information, Kaufmann provides four empirical examples of making information matter: association, conversion, secrecy, and speculation. In so doing, she presents an original and comprehensive argument about the materiality of information and invites us to investigate, and to reflect about what matters.

This is a go-to text for scholars and professionals working in the fields of surveillance, data studies, and the digitization of specific societal sectors.