Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Thoughts on Gary Marx’s Essay on “Thomas I. Voire”
The
Sociological Quarterly, Volume 43, Number 3, pages 435-438.
Go to Thomas Voire essay
| Go to
main Gary Marx page
Other
essays in this series: Willis & Silbey: Self, Vigilance and Society | Manning: Doubles and Tom Voire | Staples & Nagel: Gary’s Gone… | Marx: Reflective Eyes and Moods Apart
Christena Nippert-Eng
Illinois
Institute of Technology
Direct all
correspondence to Christena Nippert-Eng, Department of Social Sciences, 3301 S.
Dearborn, Siegel Hall Suite 116, Chicago, IL
60616; (email: nippert@iit.edu).
Modern
social life is increasingly about access – demanding it, controlling it,
denying it, achieving power through it, and/or being victimized by it. This is due in large part to the daily
introduction of new technologies and expectations for their use. These permit the natural human desire and
need to watch others to become manifested in increasingly diverse and
object-mediated forms of observation.
New things are being viewed, listened to, and sensed in new ways, then –
things that previously have been thought of as “private.” Because of this, technology undeniably and
effectively highlights and intensifies something that has always been problematic
in daily life: the boundary between
what is private and what is public.
This boundary is the focus of my own work at present 1 and this research has led me to conclude (along with Gary
Marx, I think) that highly technological and more traditional forms of surveillance
-- and all of the concerns, legal implications, behaviors and other impacts
that are associated with it -- are especially interesting places to see what
has long been an amazingly poignant source of contention and inattention. Now that it is possible not only to see
things that were previously hidden but to store, retrieve, and share that
information with relative ease, social issues and propensities that have long
been present but often ignored are coming to the fore.
This is not to say that new technologies don’t create whole
new avenues through which we must face and flesh out what we believe to be more
and less private. We seem to have
fairly well-established guidelines regarding what is private and public in
face-to-face interactions, for instance – or at least we’re good at pretending
that we do. This means that we have a
good working model when it comes to issues of bodily privacy and the privacy of
our unrecorded thoughts. But newer
technologies provide us with great opportunities to see just how badly prepared
we are to handle the package of behaviors and related concepts that might be
called “informational privacy.” In this
regard, in particular, much of today’s workplace, commerce, school life, home
life, medical care, law enforcement, public space, and media streams are
riddled with the unknown and the unethical.
Modern life also is characterized by an increasingly
individualistic twist on another of our species’ attributes: the love of a good story. Narratives that focus on individual
characters -- on personal stories -- are some of the most powerful and
compelling spaces of contemporary public life.
To the extent that these stories can be told through the element of
satire, a blockbuster is that much more assured.
If Gary Marx hasn’t done a fabulous job at capturing and
demonstrating all of this, I don’t know who has -- or who can. I just love this piece. It may be because I’ve spent an awful lot of
time becoming familiar with each and every one of the events, technologies,
legal principles, and character types that appear in Voire’s almost Pink
Pantheresque life. It may be because I
love a good sense of humor, especially when applied to things that could really
make you upset if you weren’t determined to find some humor in them. It may be because I’m at a time in my career
in which I am looking for people brave and imaginative enough to engage in new
ways of doing sociology. But I
definitely like what Gary Marx has done here.
It would take a minimum of a dedicated seminar, a stack of
books, and an ocean of newspapers -- perhaps even a couple of years’ study --
to show why the elements of the story Marx has created are so poignant. A number of primers come to mind for anyone
interested in getting started: Ellen
Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, The Right to Privacy (Vintage, 1997), Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze : The
Destruction of Privacy in America (Knopf, 2001), Anita
Allen, Uneasy Access (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), Barry
Schwartz, "The Social Psychology of
Privacy" (American Journal of Sociology 73: 741-752 [1968]), Robert Ellis Smith, Ben
Franklin’s Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity
from Plymouth Rock to the Internet (Privacy Journal,2000) and Samuel Warren
and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy” (Harvard Law Review,
4(5): 193 [December 15, 1890]). In fact, since it is so difficult to discuss
systematically why Marx’s choices of technologies and legal principles and
social behaviors are dead on target, I’ll spend a bit more of my effort here
talking instead about why I appreciate the form in which he has presented these
observations.
Despite the almost overwhelming legal and technological
information packed into this essay -- and despite the sort of creepy edge that
occasionally (and rightfully) seeps into the action -- the level of satire
present in Tom I. Voire’s story could place it right alongside the best of the
“mockumentary” genre of film. For those
in the know about surveillance, pop psychology, employment law, and the
criminal system, for instance, there are almost too many moments in this essay
that demand a good chuckle. Informed
outrage battles with head-shaking smiles for me throughout this piece.
Of course, satire only works when you know about its
object. Excellent satire requires
excellent knowledge of its subject. For
instance, readers of Wired, members of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, privacy beat reporters, corporate privacy officers,
hackers, and attendees of the annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference
would perhaps appreciate Marx’s efforts more than the average sociologist. Nonetheless, as it stands, this is a clever,
amusing, extremely provocative story that demonstrates its points in an
engaging and highly informed fashion.
It is a most welcome invitation for attention and analysis on a most
important topic.
The wisdom of this choice of form for Marx’s research findings
may be questionable for some. Not for
me. My favorite university press
editor, for instance, once asked me if I’d ever considered writing fiction. “Yes,” I replied. “But I’m afraid my fiction would look so much like my
ethnography, what would be the point?
Other than the fun of it, that is.”
As we see here, though, there are at least a few more interesting
answers to this question than I suspected back then.
To begin with, I have learned that the importance of fun –
for both authors and readers – is something not to be underestimated. Naturally, people have very different ideas
of what’s fun. Wearing a boa
constrictor, scuba diving with sharks, Stephen King novels, caviar, academic
administration – none of these quite make it onto my list. But, oddly enough, “Tom I. Voire” does.
Across the range of icky, slimy, dark-side things that are
hard to forget, Marx has seen to it that Tom, himself, falls more toward the
milder end of things than he might have otherwise. This works. It keeps a more
innocent (or cynical) reader with the author longer. Tom doesn’t really get to the skin-crawling level unless 1) you
know just how entirely possible it is that he could really exist and that
almost everything he does can indeed be done, right now and 2) you really
believe he might very well do it to you.
Indeed, if you happen to be the kind of person Tom would
like to “admire,” this can up our character’s creepy quotient quite
significantly, as well as increase the likelihood that you will not find this
essay funny, at all. Maybe you’ll even
find it insulting. I wouldn’t be at all
surprised if women generally found this essay more disturbing than men. And then, of course, there are people who
may not see the humor in this essay at all -- like NFL cheerleaders whose past
season included games in Philadelphia, victims of identity theft, those who
have been stalked, public figures (and their families) whose worst moments have
been photographed, taped and televised or published across the mass media, e-mail
users whose passphrases have been sniffed and lifted or whose correspondence
has been publicly archived, and/or computer users whose hard drives have been
impounded and used in a legal case. For
any of these folks – and quite a few other categories – it may well be
impossible to accept much less remember the lighthearted element of this
piece. In fact, once you’ve read this
essay, it might be difficult for any reader to recall its humorous aspect when
you’re about to use a rather dingy public toilet, or if you’ve just dumped your
luggage in a hotel room with a mirror facing the bed. Or even if you’re trying to close out those endless pop-under
camera ads that keep appearing during your Web surfing.
However, I think Marx’s walk along the dark-humored edge
contributes much to the literary appeal of the essay. We have here a character and a scenario in which the tension
between the harmlessness and the harm, the patheticness and the vindictiveness,
the victimizer and the victimized, and the need and desire for access and the
need and desire for privacy is well maintained. In this way, Marx quite effectively demonstrates the fuzziness of
the line separating all of these categories -- and how little it takes to slip
from one side of the boundary to the other.
He has, in a word, perfectly captured our current ambivalence about all
kinds of privacy-related moments, spaces, events, and behaviors.
It is my
professional opinion that the list of the individuals who have and will be
negatively affected by the erosion of privacy will only continue to
expand. For this reason, too, I find
Marx’s decision to write this particular piece in the way that he did quite
logical and practical. The more readers
one can reach with a story as important as this one, the better. It’s too bad, in a way, that it appears in a
professional journal rather than, say, the New Yorker (seriously edited,
no doubt.)
Classic scholarly writing is not exactly known for embracing
the masses. That’s not its point. At times, though, sociologists might be much
better off resorting to a more engaging format in order to get our points
across, even if it confuses some of our professional colleagues.
As in Miesian architecture, form should follow
function. The nontraditional form of
one’s insights doesn’t – or shouldn’t -- matter a bit in terms of the
correctness of one’s insights. All that
matters is that we write our sociology well enough to actually get the results
of our research into the venues of circulation that we seek. Of course, one must also be willing to pay
the price of rejection by anyone who feels otherwise. (Perhaps we should ask Andrew Greeley what he thinks about this.)
A fiction story is a great pedagogical space, though. It is akin to film, poetry, or novels --
anything that isn’t a classic, scholarly reporting of findings -- in helping to
reach people. It is perfectly,
intentionally, ironic and important that Marx has chosen a far more accessible
form to present his observations on the dangers of accessibility. Nonetheless, choices like these embrace
readers/viewers in ways that our traditional forms of writing do not. They also let us reach into ourselves and
develop our understandings of our foci of attention -- as sociologists, as
writers, as teachers -- in ways that scholarly articles and monographs
don’t. It takes talent to be able to
let the form in which one presents one’s findings match or emerge out of the
findings themselves. It takes not only
an ability to feel what might be the best way to present one’s ideas to one’s
desired audience but also the storytelling skills to execute this vision as one
wishes. In addition, it takes the
courage to give it a try.
Ultimately, the best sociological writing invites and allows
readers to share the results of an author’s hard work. It offers original conceptual tools and
information about empirical patterns and interweaves these with similar
disciplinary elements that have already been put out there. The best sociological writing also may
provide an opportunity for readers to explore and develop their own concepts
and empirical understandings. Rich,
engaging descriptions of people, behavior, places, events, and artifacts more
openly invite readers to develop their own interpretations of what’s going
on. At least one of the goals of
authoritative, scholarly reporting is to beat us over the head with the
author’s sociological expertise. With
the carrot of entertainment, however, the same expert could write a different
kind of piece, using her or his authority more quietly, more enticingly, as it
were. Its role would be to help filter
out endless details and story line options, so that only the most
sociologically salient remain. The result
might be a better invitation to think, to imagine, along with her or him. Such a piece might be much better at opening
discussion rather than closing it.
For sociologists, then, at least two of the implications of
this essay are, first, we ought to pay close attention to the actual and
potential manifestations of privacy concerns in everyday life. These are important aspects of daily life
within a changing culture and society.
Second, we should definitely consider writing scholarly insights in less
scholarly formats, more often. In fact,
it will be interesting indeed to see if the next step in the life of this essay
involves Gary Marx negotiating with Hollywood.
I suspect they will seriously insist on changing the ending, though.
Note
- This research project, called
“Islands of Privacy,” is funded by a generous grant from the Intel
Corporation’s university sponsored research program associated with Intel
Architecture Laboratories.
Go to Thomas Voire essay | Go to main Gary Marx page
Christena Nippert-Eng is an associate professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author of Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1996). She is currently engaged in a research project entitled "Islands of Privacy," funded by the Intel Corporation and focusing on the experience of privacy at home, in the workplace, and throughout public spaces. She teaches courses on culture, the workplace, space and time, cognitive sociology, and fieldwork methods.
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