Surveillance and Surveys: the Soft Interview of the Future

In my book Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (Marx 2016) I analyze many of the social, political, ethical and cultural issues raised by the new surveillance. The book uses a variety of traditional methods such as observation, interviews, document analysis and quantitative measures to document surveillance behaviors such as video, drones, DNA, drug testing and computer monitoring. The facts generated by such methods, when located within a conceptual framework, can help us understand structures and processes of surveillance. But in general they are of less use in understanding the culture that surrounds surveillance, in particular the justifications and counters offered by agents and subjects and the feelings associated with watching and being watched. Surveillance is not only applied, it is also experienced. To better grasp that experience we need stories as offered in song lyrics, images and imagined, but realistic, case studies that are (as the movies say) "inspired by real events". These components of the culture of surveillance infuse our minds and everyday life. They speak to (and may be intended to create or manipulate) needs, aspirations and fears. The book identifies a number of social processes associated with contemporary surveillance. These include its diffusion via creeping or galloping, monetarization, commoditization, the blurring of public-private organizational borders, globalization, normalization, neutralization and counter-neutralization and the myth and mystification of surveillance. I give particular emphasis to a social process involving the softening of surveillance as it becomes less visible and less directly coercive. In this process the environment is structured such that surveillance is unseen, being hard engineered in. In another form it is soft engineered in, being hidden, disguised, and/or deceptive, manipulative and persuasive. People may believe they have made an informed choice, whether for material rewards such as with frequent shoppers or for security. Because it is of low visibility and/or not experienced or defined as intrusive or invasive, resistance is less likely. The fictional report that follows uses satire to illustrate the softening of surveillance as it is, or might be, applied sometime in the future by social researchers with the loftiest of communal motives and the clearest of consciences. This is one of a series of fictional accounts I use to illustrate how surveillan