Colleagues –Thales got it right! As scholars it is central that we bring the same (or perhaps even greater) questioning to our own endeavors. As I complete a 6th decade of social inquiry involving information and communication issues, perhaps
the reflections above will be amusing, or at least provoke fundamentalists and unreconstructed positivists. As Erving Goffman said, “it’s all data.” The attached and some other recent reflections sum up a lot of what I think and feel after a long journey,
all swathed in the sociology of knowledge and in the centrality of reflexivity, but with the firm conviction that there are transcendent truths to pursue and fight for. Figuring them out is what it’s all about. Cheers, keep the faiths and best for the holidays!
Gary
Recent Articles:
Fran Morente and Gary T. Marx, “I break in order to reveal”.
Fran Morente Interview With Gary T. Marx About Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology, Society, vol. 56:5.
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/morente-marx.html
Gary T. Marx, “A Satirical (?) Book Review of
Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology
by its Author, The American Sociologist, vol. 50, no. 4, Dec. 2019
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/satire.html
Keith Guzik and Gary T. Marx “Politics, Policy and Crime Ethnography”
Oxford University Handbook on Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice,
forthcoming
Gary T. Marx, “Bentham on Modern Social Control: Prescient, Clairvoyant and More”
International Criminal Justice Review, forthcoming
Gary T. Marx, “A less Perfect But Freer Society?”
European Data Protection Law Review, vol. 4:44:4, 2019. https://edpl.lexxion.eu/current_issue/EDPL
Gary T. Marx,
“Inside the Tent: Some Reflections on Working for the 1967 Kerner Commission”
longer version of a paper written for R. Shellow, D. Boesel, D. Sears and Gary T. Marx, (with others) The
Harvest of American Racism (University of Michigan Press, 2018)
Pat Gillham and Gary T. Marx, “Changes in the Policing of Civil Disorders Since the Kerner Report: The Police Response to
Ferguson, August 2014, and Some Implications for the Twenty-First Century
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, vol. 4 no. 6, 2018.
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/kerner_changes.html
Keith Guzik and Gary T. Marx “Global Security Surveillance”
(Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice)
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/global.html
Gary T. Marx and Keith Guzik, “The uncertainty principle Qualification, contingency and fluidity in technology and social control” in
The Routledge Handbook of Technology and Culture. 2017. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/uncertainty.html
BOOK REVIEW: Jan Goldman and Susan Maret “Intelligence and Information Policy for National Security”. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
Secrecy and Society. 2017. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/rev_goldman_maret.html
Gary T. Marx, “What’s It All About? Reflections on Meaning in a Career” In R. Darling and P. Stein, Sociological Lives, 2017.
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/whatsit.html