Abstract
This book was largely written during the first year of the Coronavirus pandemic, but its origins go back much earlier. It reflects Eric Stoddart’s growing sense of unease about the degree of surveillance in contemporary society and the effect it is having on our lives. He makes a good case for the creeping influence that data drawn from digital technologies is having on the formulation of policy in almost all areas of life, from health to schooling to crime, let alone the impact of the habits and preferences we make available through social media.
Stoddart sees his work as an essay in public theology – theology that is done in public following a cycle of reflection, which, as he puts it, does not ‘privilege orthodox perspectives’ and that is open to insight from non-theological disciplines. His standpoint is that of the theologian willing to co-opt his or her discipline in order to confront injustice. As Stoddart sees it, one of the least benign impacts of our tolerance of surveillance is a worsening of the gap between rich and poor. Our most cherished institutions are threatened by the reach of surveillance, including democracy itself. Most seriously, the surveillance culture makes us all playthings of global capitalism, potentially disenfranchising millions. The ‘common gaze’ of our smartphones and tablets is a real and actual threat to the common good.
This is an important theme and an area that is ripe for theological consideration. As a non-expert in this field, however, I have to admit that I found The Common Gaze quite difficult to read. Like some other theological forays into areas that border sociological disciplines, it is written in a linguistic argot which does not favour comprehension. This is not to say that there are not useful insights here – as, for example, when Stoddart compares and contrasts the cold, data-driven ‘gaze’ of contemporary surveillance with the culture of ‘watching’ in the Bible, a watching which may be that of the sentinel on the city gates or the good shepherd watching over the flock, while looking out for the lost and the outcast.
In this example, this benign ‘watching over’ is what surveillance culture fails to do. In fact, it does the opposite, dividing people into categories on the basis of their digitally inferred preferences and characteristics. This leads to the weakening of social bonds and the increase of division – hence the destructive tribalism of social media.