Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America

American studies scholar Lewis (Navajo Talking Picture) offers a wide-ranging set of approaches to assessing the pervasive yet often subtle consequences of modern surveillance technologies in the United States and the West more generally. Pitching his analysis to a general reader, the author draws on popular culture as well as a growing body of scholarship and the details of his own biography to broaden and deepen our appreciation of surveillance’s psychological and social impact. Lewis thus takes in not only government and corporate activities but other forms of surveillance. These include “domestic surveillance,” or the highly gendered and class-inflected systems of supervision and control experienced in childhood, and the “playful surveillance” of online games and other commercial gadgetry conducted in the name of pleasure and social connection. Adding nuance to this generally bleak picture of a all-encompassing denial of privacy, Lewis acknowledges certain (potentially) liberating aspects of the latter category of surveillance, which he dubs “the Funopticon,” after the panopticon, an 18th-century plan for mass surveillance. Not every chapter is equally original or insightful, but this book contributes a clear formulation of key issues at stake while reminding us that technological advances unaccompanied by critical reflection and public discussion risk what Thoreau—one of Lewis’s political and philosophical touchstones—called “but improved means to an unimproved end.” [em](Nov.) [/em]