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Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America
- Narrated by: Gary Roelofs
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
Never before has so much been known about so many. CCTV cameras, TSA scanners, NSA databases, big data marketers, predator drones, "stop and frisk" tactics, Facebook algorithms, hidden spyware, and even old-fashioned nosy neighbors - surveillance has become so ubiquitous that we take its presence for granted. While many types of surveillance are pitched as ways to make us safer, almost no one has examined the unintended consequences of living under constant scrutiny and how it changes the way we think and feel about the world. In Under Surveillance, Randolph Lewis offers a highly original look at the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic challenges of living with surveillance in America since 9/11.
Lewis explores the growth of surveillance in surprising places, such as childhood and nature. He traces the rise of businesses designed to provide surveillance and security, including those that cater to the Bible Belt's houses of worship. And he peers into the dark side of playful surveillance, such as eBay's Online guide to "Fun with Surveillance Gadgets." A worried but ultimately genial guide to this landscape, Lewis helps us see the hidden costs of living in a "control society" in which surveillance is deemed essential to governance and business alike.
Critic reviews
"An engaging, alarming, and enlightening book, one that is certain to be among the most important books on surveillance in the twenty-first century." (Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia)
"This incredibly compelling book provides a thoughtful and engaging exploration of the affective dimensions of contemporary surveillance." (Torin Monahan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
"A sprightly tour down some of the surveillance society's most claustrophobic corridors." (Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Walkaway)
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Turn on a cable news show or pick up any news magazine, and you get the impression that Christian America is on its last leg. The once dominant faith is now facing rapidly declining church attendance, waning political influence, and an abysmal public perception. More than 76% of Americans self-identify as Christians, but many today are ashamed to carry the label. While many Christians are bemoaning their faith’s decline, Gabe Lyons is optimistic that Christianity’s best days are yet to come.
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Ok some good points.
- By Donna on 03-07-23
By: Gabe Lyons
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The Worm at the Core
- On the Role of Death in Life
- By: Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 100 years ago, the American philosopher William James wrote that the knowledge that we must die is "the worm at the core" of the human condition - a universally shared fear that informs all our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage.
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Skeptical at first, but they won me over.
- By Tory Giddens on 06-07-20
By: Jeff Greenberg, and others
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The Opposite of Hate
- A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity
- By: Sally Kohn
- Narrated by: Sally Kohn
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences, learning how to talk civilly to people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Famously "nice", she even gave a TED Talk about what she termed emotional correctness. But these days, even Kohn has found herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. It was time, she decided, to look into the ugliness erupting all around us.
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Profoundly insightful, important, and digestible.
- By Scott on 04-24-18
By: Sally Kohn
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Men Explain Things to Me
- By: Rebecca Solnit
- Narrated by: Luci Christian Bell
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling.
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Great read - horrible performance
- By Denise Johnson on 03-26-15
By: Rebecca Solnit
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The Almost Nearly Perfect People
- Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
- By: Michael Booth
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than 10 years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely audiobook, he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.
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Obsessed with bad politics
- By Erik on 09-07-20
By: Michael Booth
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Age of Ambition
- Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos, George Backman
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
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Come back when you have a warrant!
- By Neuron on 11-06-15
By: Evan Osnos
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What Unites Us
- Reflections on Patriotism
- By: Dan Rather, Elliot Kirschner
- Narrated by: Dan Rather
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.
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Hope. For both sides of the aisle.
- By Leigh A. Barrett on 01-30-18
By: Dan Rather, and others
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On Freedom
- Four Songs of Care and Constraint
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
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Just great
- By Kristi Strong on 12-14-21
By: Maggie Nelson
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Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
- What It Means to Be Black Now
- By: Touré, Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Touré
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.
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Food for Thought
- By Sara on 12-22-11
By: Touré, and others
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Children of Jihad
- By: Jared Cohen
- Narrated by: Jason Collins
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Classrooms were never sufficient for Jared Cohen; he wanted to learn about global affairs by witnessing them firsthand. While studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, he took a crash course in Arabic, read voraciously on the history and culture of the Middle East, and in 2004 he embarked on the first of a series of incredible journeys to the Middle East. In an effort to try to understand the spread of radical Islamist violence, he focused his research on Muslim youth.
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Awakens hope
- By Diane on 09-23-08
By: Jared Cohen
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Smarter Than You Think
- How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
- By: Clive Thompson
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.
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Title should be Getting Smarter Through Technology
- By A. Yoshida on 03-10-17
By: Clive Thompson
What listeners say about Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mel Woods
- 04-29-21
A timely read
~Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this audiobook.~
With the increasing surveillance and growth of smart technology, this book is about a timely topic. This book is broken into six chapters: Feeling Surveillance, Welcome to the Funopticon, Growing up Observed, Watching Walden, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, and The Business of Insecurity. The author cites his sources extensively and offers some philosophical questions along with the material presented. The author at times repeats concepts and can be a bit wordy. We truly don’t know what the impact of all this surveillance is at this time, and the future will judge where we went from acceptable to having crossed the line.
I found the narrator easy to listen to. There was a time when the quality of the recording seemed to change (starting in the last third of chapter 2).
I had a few thoughts and notable quotes:
Randolph Lewis speaks about citizen surveillance regarding policing and activism. He makes a point about the importance of these videos, as in the example he uses, the Kajieme Powell shooting, the police account doesn’t match the video evidence. However, he points out that “Mostly, what we get from his video is knowledge, not justice, not a preventive measure that stops the abuse.” (pg 28). It is easy to feel hopeful in the wake of the George Floyd case, but when so often we don’t see consequences, it would be unwise to forget that often there is no justice, even with video evidence.
“To my mind, I’ve got nothing to hide has become one of the most disingenuous phrases in the English language. Often spoken with a privileged voice that assumes it can hide what really needs to be hidden, that it has the power to pull the curtains when the need arises, it is generally a hollow boast. Those who utter it are rarely prepared for someone to start burrowing into every forgotten email, late-night purchase, speeding ticket, or ill-considered Twitter message that will outlive their corporeal selves. Even a strutting exhibitionist has something to hide: certain diary entries, genetic predispositions, financial mistakes, medical crises, teenage embarrassments, antisocial compulsions, sexual fantasies, radical dreams. We all have something that we want to shield from public view.” Pg. 10
There is some humor in the technology I use frequently being critiqued in this book (including the fact that I use kindle and goodreads for my reviews). The gamification or the entertainment provided by the technology that sells your data talked about during chapter 2 hits hard. The author points out that “...we are often having too much fun to notice how much we are revealing...” with our use of posting what we read on kindle, what we look at on Snapchat or what we tweet (pg. 69).
“Welcome to the “Funopticon,” a new metaphor that I want to suggest for the increasingly playful surveillance culture of the twenty-first century. Even as surveillance wraps itself around our bodies in ways that might strike some people as humiliating and exploitative, it is doing something else as well: it is operating in a way that doesn’t always feel oppressive or heavy, but rather feels like pleasure, convenience, choice, and community.” Pg. 54
I didn’t find all chapters as engaging as others, but that is personal preference. In the chapter Growing Up Observed, I expected it to focus more on social media and children of today, but instead there was a heavy focus on parents surveillance of children and on how abuse makes children more sensitive to surveillance. I think questioning the impact of constantly being surveilled your whole life is something that is interesting to address.
“Are you comfortable with a home security drone hovering over your house? Do you want your child’s school to monitor her social media posts? Do you mind if Yahoo! is scanning all of your personal emails for keywords provided by the NSA or FBI? Do you bristle at the idea of someone looking down at you from a CCTV camera? The answer may lie in your biography, particularly in aspects of your identity that make you feel empowered or not, autonomous or not, respected or not, vulnerable or not.” Pg. 95
The chapter, Watching Walden, ended up more wordy than necessary. I think the fact that I don't revere Thoreau doesn't help my perception of this chapter either. While there are things to be gleaned from his writing and life, I am far more critical of him than Randolph Lewis is (he briefly addresses the criticism, but focuses on whether or not Thoreau is a misogynist). His writing was not in fact reflective of the life he actually led and is a result of the privileged life that he had. I think the point about the increase of cameras, drones and other technology into natural spaces is a valid one, but the viewpoint of the chapter didn’t speak to me.
“Church surveillance is marketed, consumed, and deployed without a nod to structural issues such as gun laws, racialized and gendered poverty, the treatment of the mentally ill, or the ripple effects of living in an increasingly militarized culture. Instead, this segment of the Christian right dismisses such concerns by simply claiming that “evil” is at work, that their congregations are staring down an implacable force so potent that nothing can stop it except, perhaps, guns, locks, and security cameras.” Pg. 193
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