Reading surveilled

[W]e have awoken to find a retail panopticon where everything we say or see is observed, counted, and recorded. . . . Even readerly underlining, once the bastion of self-referentiality, is now being viewed for marketing purposes with the help of electronic readers. There is no outside the network today except the ever dwindling space-time of off. As Don DeLillo writes in Valparaiso, his satirical drama of contemporary media, “Everything is the interview.” We have returned to a world before the invention of privacy.

Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

And now the act of reading itself is becoming data. Read all about it: As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You (The New York Times).

[Mac Dictation turned panopticon into panoptic con. Hmm. Thanks for the book, Ben.]