Gary T. Marx - Areas of Professional Interest

Areas of Professional Interest

In recent decades he has been working on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts (e.g., the new surveillance, surveillance society, maximum security society, surveillance creep; surveillance slack, the softening of surveillance, the myth of surveillance, neutralization and counter-neutralization, and four basic surveillance contexts: coercion, contracts, care, and cross cutting, unprotected "publicly" available data). The richness of the empirical must be disentangled and parsed into categories which can be measured. Articles at illustrate this. His empirical and theoretical studies on topics such as covert policing, computer matching and profiling, work monitoring, drug testing, location monitoring, Caller-ID and communications manners are not above the occasional stoop to humor. The work argues for the need to understand current surveillance practices within specific settings in light of history, culture, social structure and the give and take of interaction and to appreciate (if not necessarily welcome) the ironies, paradoxes, trade-offs and value conflicts which limit the best laid plans. Mushrooms do well in the dark, but so does injustice. Sunlight may bring needed accountability through visibility, but it can also blind and burn and unlevel playing fields, like the Dude, tend to endure.