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."