Reviews for Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life

The average rating for Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-07 00:00:00 Kelsey Chason While Shenk's "cautionary notes" err on the side of the measured critiques of a turn-of-the-century technological participant-observer, this book's potential value as a bellwether of, for instance, conscientious information consumption is completely undermined by the braying topicality of the project. Because these articles were largely written as either pointed and timely inquiries into the social value of very particular and short-lived services (e.g. Pointcast), or as more diffuse, exploratory works on the ethical considerations underlying the adoption of certain technological advancements (e.g. cloning and the Human Genome Project), they betray their age rather poorly. Shenk here sits atop the comfortable perch of a guarded cum unassailable optimism that comes packaged as some sort of "objective" or "realist" cynicism about the progress/efficiency narrative of the Web age. The author and his contemporaries coin their approach "technorealism", which can often be reduced to sloganeering about cost/benefit games and "faster not being better". Very fine and good, but this collection is all too piecemeal to accumulate the needed momentum to allow such obvious umbrellas to hold fast. Shenk even pads the page count with excerpts of email communications with his friends! Not to mention the articles about photojournalism and Photoshop or ticker news feeds and personalized homepages that seem downright, naively folksy ten years down the line. The one excellent piece herein about the marriage between Biotech and University laboratory science does not a book make. (There's also some merit to "Stealing Calm", a paean to radio in our soundbite-happy times). There are better book-length arguments regarding the matters of import here (see Fukuyama's "Our Post-Human Future" on cloning, or any Neil Postman for heartier humanism). Is it a coincidence that writers of the mid-20th Century like Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society) or Orwell wrote more convincingly on our current socio-technological dilemmas? Their isolation from the modern ubiquities of information technology allowed for the kind of thinking we don't seem capable of as we're strapped in for the ride. No disrespect to Shenk, but this sort of journalism should really just hit the microfiche. ...Google books, that is!

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-04 00:00:00 Richard Williams An enthralling read on the pitfalls of information technology and the speeding up of data / technology / society. It is a collection of essays and correspondence from the late 90s, yet much of it is relevant today. The phenomena Shenk describes have only accelerated in the past decade, and we are feeling the effects, including shorter attention spans and the devolution of any sort of robust media channels. This book has me seriously reconsidering the role technology plays in my life.