By Phil Agre
Everybody knows that credit companies, marketing firms, and government agencies know a lot about us. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information is a veritable encyclopedia of research on the industry that collects and distributes this information. Author Oscar Gandy's work has three major strengths: its theoretical background, its empirical studies, and its thorough documentation.
Start with the footnotes. There are at least 700 of them, providing a handy reference to a wide range of academic writing, corporate reports, and journalism on the subject of personal information.
Then move on back to the theory. The peculiar title, The Panoptic Sort, refers to a proposal by the early 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham for a building – the Panopticon – whose construction would allow all of its inhabitants to be maintained under constant surveillance, and to the computational process of sorting personal information to produce discrete "segments" in the population. This latter process of institutionalized high-tech discrimination is the book's moral focus. As marketers and political campaign workers intensify their segmentation of the populace, he argues, the dream of social unity and equality fades further into the background.
The book's most important contribution, though, is its empirical studies of people's responses to personal-data collection. Concern varies most widely during important life changes such as marriage and buying a home, but ideas and values about privacy in the media also have a strong influence on individuals' concerns about privacy.
It's a pessimistic book, laying out the forces that tend to cause personal information to be collected and centralized. As such, it will not please conservatives, with their faith in markets, or progressives, with their faith in people's capacity for resistance. But, hey, maybe he's right.
The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, by Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., US$61.50 hardback, $18.95 paperback. Westview Press: (800) 456 1995, +1 (303) 444 3541.
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