By Gordon Anderson | gordon@rantnc.com

Somewhere, someone’s probably watching you. Over the past two decades, surveillance – especially in its digital forms – has become such a routine part of everyday life that it’s almost faded into the background.

Dr. David Watson, a humanities instructor at Central Carolina Community College, wants you to keep that thought in focus. Not because you should be paranoid (well, not just because you should be paranoid), but because it’s actively changing the way we process “truth” in the modern world.

That was the impetus for Watson’s new book, “Surveillance Noir: Being Watched in 21st Century Film and Literature,” which came out on June 4 via Cambridge Press. Watson used crime fiction in many of its forms as a lens through which to talk about the ways in which we’re being watched – and the ways that’s changing our world.

“Anything we think of as crime fiction is going to fall under the idea of surveillance somehow,” Watson said. “All the digital detritus of where you’ve been and who you’ve communicated with. I used things like ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to talk about how this architecture of surveillance is shaping what becomes ‘truth.’ I took a pretty expanded idea of what I see as crime fiction – you might not think of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that way, but there’s this totalitarian government, people are murdered. All the elements are there. The genre’s much richer if you think about what makes something illegal, and who’s judging this.”

Similarly, Watson discusses works ranging from “Against a Loveless World,” a story about the journey of a young Palestinian refugee, to recent works by Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson.

This isn’t Watson’s first foray into the topic. In 2021, he published “Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction,” also via Cambridge. It mined similar territory – including a chapter on HBO’s “The Wire,” a crime story often hailed as one of the greatest television series ever – and Watson acknowledges the common thread in the works.

“That book talks a lot about how truth has gone from something being discovered to something being produced,” he said.

It took Watson about two years to complete the text, which is meant primarily for academic settings, although he said he worked to make it digestible for anyone.

“I started thinking about this when I’d just completed my last book. I took about a year to read a bunch of novels and a bunch of theory,” he said. “Once your proposal is accepted, you get peer reviewed and you get a bunch of edits. The publication process just takes some time.”

The book will be available in both physical and digital formats, and you should be able to purchase a copy through any major book retailer. Watson says the subject matter may not be comforting exactly, but worth plenty of thought nonetheless.

“I think about the threat to bees,” he said. “Humans aren’t worried about bees because we’re worried about individual bees. And maybe we’re like that in a way – from our perspective it feels like we’re living our lives, but maybe we’re just programming the cloud.”