Windows into the Soul

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 compor...

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.

Gary T. Marx is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having also taught at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. His writings for academic, policy, and popular audiences have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,...

Gary T. Marx is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having also taught at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author most recently of Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. His writings for academic, policy, and popular audiences have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and New Republic. For more information, please see www.garymarx.net. In 2017, Vrije Universiteit Brussel awarded Marx an honorary doctorate for his original and stimulating contributions to the study of surveillance and security.