IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 4

Book Review
Scott D. Eldridge

The Circle
By Dave Eggers. Knopf, 2013, 491 pages.

ave you taken the
plu n g e a nd pu rchased one of the
new wearable fitness tracking devices available on the market? These
electronic gadgets offer marvelous insight into our daily physical
activity and fitness. Many of them
can continuously quantify our
activity by measuring factors like
steps taken, hours slept, and heartbeats per minute. These products
use software algorithms to process our quantified physiological
data to give us a detailed picture
intended to motivate us to lead a
healthier lifestyle.
Suppose your personal fitness
tracking data is no longer private.
Imagine that data is automatically
forwarded to your doctor under
the pretext of enabling your physician to have better insight into
your health so she can provide
you with better health care. Then
suppose this same fitness data
is automatically shared on your
social media accounts with the
intent to inspire your community of friends to be healthier and
to suppor t you in your health
endeavors. It also is fed automatically to your employer under the
notion that your health is integral

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2395964
Date of publication: 23 March 2015

to your work success, and your
employer has a vested interest in
knowing and aiding you to achieve
your health goals. Suddenly, one's
once-pr ivate fitness dat a ha s
been automatically disseminated
to the most public and influential
spheres of your life.
This scenario is a slice out of
the plotline in Dave Eggers' recent
novel, The Circle, and it illustrates
his fictional world where pieces of
information about everyday people
are collected, analyzed, aggregated, and disseminated to various
data consumers, always under the
pretense of benefitting the greater
societal good. Eggers constructs a
near-future corporation called the
Circle, whose goal is to achieve
total societal surveillance through
a pervasive process of observing, digitizing, and archiving the
everyday actions of individuals in
society. This process of digitizing
observed behavior is the process
of quantification. Whether the
quantification comes in the form
of installing millions of miniature
video cameras in public spaces,
or digitizing all the world's videos, or absurdly-enough, counting all the grains of sand in the
Sahara, the Circle's fundamental
enabling feature is its obsessive
focus on the quantification of
humanity into digital form. Societal quantification is the root of
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the company's success and also
its Achilles' heel.
As a writer, Eggers is adept in
convincing the reader that the
level of societal visibility described
in his book is completely possible. He accomplishes this in two
ways. First, Eggers' ideas are builtup in a layered, step-wise fashion.
Notice in the fitness-monitoring
example above, the data is first
used as an innocent way to maintain one's health. With each step
increase in the spread of this fitness data, the additional degree
of personal surveillance is rationalized and made more socially
palatable. As each layer of dissemination is added, the rationalization argument is repeated. With
each successive increase of dissemination, Eggers is progressively establishing a new cultural and
privacy norm. The process repeats
until he has achieved the unwitting
acceptance of a new social paradigm. This new paradigm would
have been summarily rejected if
attempted in a single step because
such a large discontinuity would
have been seen as violating the
societal norms, i.e., the contextual integrity of one's privacy. Privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum
describes this phenomenon as the
"tyranny of the normal." Nissenbaum explains that the idea of the
contextual integrity of the status
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MARCH 2015

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