Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

There is more third-party reading of email correspondence being done now than ever before: cybertools like algorithms may allow Google’s gmail service to place ads on your screen, but this immediately conjures less savory possibilities lurking in the wings. The same holds for smartphones, a trove of your photo album, record library, personal journal, and correspondence desk, all vulnerable to surveillance, not to mention software “cookies” that allow Viacom and other big brothers to track your actions across the internet. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear cases about digital privacy, Gary Marx’s book will serve as a touchstone for discussions of how extractive technologies like computers, spectrographs, video lenses, and the like can troll through our personal lives. This book provides a language and a conceptual guide to the understanding of surveillance structures and processes. Windows into the Soul touches on themes such as the public and the private, secrecy, anonymity, confidentiality, accountability, trust and distrust, the social bond, the self and social control, and power and democracy. As one of our ms. readers says, nobody in this expanding field of surveillance studies has read as much, reflected on its meaning, and written about these trends with so much insight, wisdom, and humor. Here, Marx sums up a lifetime of careful thinking and research on the concepts, technologies, and themes of surveillance. The account is richly laced with examples, many of them up-to-date (drones, anyone?), and, cumulatively, all of them useful fodder for anyone interesting in grappling with newer issues such as social media surveillance as well more traditional initiatives. Marx shows how surveillance penetrates social and personal lives in profound ways.
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. InWindows 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.