Windows into the Soul
Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology
We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers – and the merely curious – to see. In "Windows into the Soul", Gary T. Marx, a central figure in the rapidly expanding field of surveillance studies, argues that surveillance itself is neither good nor bad, but that context and comportment make it so. In this landmark book, Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, Marx draws on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location and work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more, Marx gives us a conceptual language to understand the new realities and his work clearly emphasizes the paradoxes, trade-offs, and confusion enveloping the field".Windows into the Soul" shows how surveillance can penetrate our social and personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society.
About the Author
Gary T. Marx is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of "Undercover: Police Surveillance in America". His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the "New York Times", "Wall Street Journal", "Washington Post", and the "New Republic".
Reviews
"Nobody in field of surveillance studies has read, reflected on, or written about these trends with as much insight, wisdom, and humor as Marx. He has never been afraid to push the boundaries of social inquiry, not only by developing new theories, metaphors, or models, but by patiently amassing a rich variety of facts, stories, cases, incidents, and anecdotes and by trying to make some sense of the staggering and increasing propensity for surveillance. He relishes complexity and ambiguity and constantly tries to disaggregate and classify, not out of some infatuation with taxonomies for their own sake, but in a belief that we can only build generalizations about social trends if we are sensitive to context. 'Windows Into the Soul' should be widely read for many years to come" – Colin J. Bennett, author of "The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance"
