IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 11

Book Review
Donna Halper

Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society
in an Age of High Technology
By Gary T. Marx, University of Chicago Press, 2016, 400 pp.

t goes without saying that we live in an
information society.
Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, we are able to quickly find the
most up-to-date information, whether we are accessing the work of scholars or seeking suggestions about the
best new restaurants. As media ecologist Marshall McLuhan predicted,
our devices have become extensions
of ourselves: we are always connected, which allows us to text or tweet
as often as we wish, and makes it
easy to search for answers to whatever questions we might have.
But this easy availability of so
much information comes with tradeoffs - we have to give up some of
our privacy in order to access it. For
example, most websites track the
people who visit and what their purpose is (what articles they read, what
items they buy, and what they share
with their friends on social media).
Many popular apps on our phones
want to know our location. In fact,
most businesses, especially those
with a major online presence, are
eager to find out more about who
uses their products and services.
Surveillance techniques used to be
mainly associated with secretive governmental agencies like the FBI or
CIA; but these days the Internet has

contributed to making surveillance
far more pervasive, and far easier to
accomplish than ever before.
In his new book, Windows into
the Soul: Surveillance and Society in
an Age of High Technology, sociologist Gary T. Marx addresses whether
we have not only become an information society but also a surveillance
society. Marx has great familiarity,
and an ongoing interest, in this topic.
He explains that his research into
the history of surveillance was partly
inspired by his growing up during the
Cold War and the era of McCarthyism, as well as by observing such
abuses of power as what President
Nixon did during Watergate. By the
1970s, Marx was teaching and writing about surveillance and social
control, at a time when few academics were studying the topic.
A professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Marx is the author of the 1988 book
Undercover: Police Surveillance in
America. He states that one of his
goals in writing Windows into the
Soul is to "...advance understanding of the social and ethical aspects
of personal information control and
discovery... to understand how individuals and organizations present
themselves through the control and
release of personal information, and
how others respond to this." As a
sociologist, he also seeks to "help
define the fragmented field of surveillance studies and contribute to

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2670221
Date of publication: 6 March 2017

march 2017

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

the broader field of the sociology
of information."
Where Undercover focused mainly on the techniques used by law
enforcement, Windows into the Soul
is far more expansive: in our Internet age, it is not just the police, nor
even the government, who seek out
more data about more people. In
thoroughly addressing surveillance
techniques past and present, Marx
avoids being polemical; he explains
that he did not write this book to
argue that surveillance is in and of
itself something good, nor for that
matter, something bad. He states
that he is "Neither Technophobe nor
Technophile (323)," and he sees himself as an "honest broker" in facilitating discussions between the various
interest groups-including those who
feel that surveillance is nearly always
wrong, and those who feel that under
some circumstances, it is necessary.
In that regard, Marx observes that
it is usually the context, (including
how the surveillance is conducted
and under what circumstances), that
influences the public's attitudes
about it. He speaks about discourses which present surveillance as the
opposite of privacy, allowing for the
former to be framed negatively and
the latter positively. This perception
is undoubtedly affected by news stories, such as one about AIDS patients
whose personal data was accessed
and sold. But Marx points out that it
is often surveillance techniques that

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017