The Circle [Book Review]

The book presents ways in which personal behaviors are digitized and assesses its implications. 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.