Premiering in September 2011, the science-fiction crime drama television series Person of Interest presaged later revelations of real-life government mass surveillance efforts like the NSA PRISM program. The show follows reclusive billionaire software developer Harold Finch and former CIA agent John Reese as they attempt to prevent violent crimes using “The Machine,” a secret artificially intelligent mass surveillance system built by Finch and designed to detect acts of terror. These acts are divided into relevant terrorist attacks and irrelevant violent crimes involving ordinary people. To protect the privacy rights of citizens, The Machine only identifies relevant and irrelevant targets by “numbers” or person’s Social Security number, and it sends these to Finch and Reese via encoded messages using the Dewey Decimal System. Operating out of an abandoned New York Public Library — a building whose closure Finch characterizes as “the decline of Western civilization” — Finch and Reese attempt to save those who are deemed irrelevant.
Long before Person of Interest and Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, librarians were crusading for privacy rights and against government surveillance. Just as libraries figure into the real-world battle over privacy and surveillance, so too do they play a role in Person of Interest’s fictional struggle. This paper explores the intersections of the show’s portrayal of libraries and its commentary on the place of technology and privacy in contemporary society. At those intersections exists a commentary about the state of libraries and a vision for their role at a time when they are grappling with their own relevance as a result of Google and other developments of the Digital Age.
About the presenterBryan James McGeary
Bryan James McGeary is the Learning Design and Open Education Engagement Librarian at Penn State University. He has a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MS in Journalism from Ohio University.