Martha Bayles teaches humanities at Boston College and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad and Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music. Her reviews and essays on the arts, media, and cultural policy appear in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Weekly Standard.
Is the whole world slouching toward a Panopticon of digitally enabled surveillance and control?