Under constant surveillance: A video about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity”

By María Belén Conti, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster.

I have directed a movie about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity” that has been edited by André Jansson and Miyase Christensen.Watch the video interview here! https://vimeo.com/91504300

As early as 1995, John Thompson was talking of a world of “mediated visibility” in which technology was a double-edged sword, since it allowed the few people in power positions to control the many, but also empowered the many to control those few. Since then, many things have changed, with the Internet growing in importance as well as with the appearance of a new actor: social media.

In these social and networked spaces, private and public communications merge and the invisible turns visible. It is no longer easy to maintain the private sphere private and unintended audiences may reach any message we send. But these unintended audiences that have access to our communications are not only other users but also government agencies and companies, as Edward Snowden’s revelations known as the “NSA affair” and the many forms of targeted advertising can testify.

In other words, we are always potentially under surveillance or monitoring by others, either peers, companies or states. Even though that does not mean that we are all the time under one-on-one monitoring, the potential is there. And most of the times, there is a big power asymmetry, since people sometimes do not even know that they are being watched or, if they do, they feel powerless or out of options.

Even though it can be argued that people can use social and networked media for free in exchange of giving up some personal information, as Miyase Christensen explains in the video, people are in fact paying a very big price for that supposedly free use. Mark Andrejevic argues in this context in the collected volume that data has become “the new oil” or commodity exchanged and commercialized for the “free use” of services.

In other words, even though people may think they are the clients of these social and networked media, they are in fact the product being sold to advertisers in order to make profits. What is more, they are “unpaid workers”, as Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani argued in the collected volume, since they are producing all the data being sold to the advertisers, who will then target those same users with specific forms of ads, according to their taste and interests.

But is an alternative to that commercial model possible? In fact, there are some alternative social media such as Diaspora* which intend to protect the data of the users. However, people want to be where most of their peers are, so it is hard to make them migrate to this alternative social media. And in the lack of better solutions, or at least until a better idea comes, education and better legislation to protect users are needed, as both Miyase Christensen and André Jansson, editors of the book Media, Surveillance and Indentity. Social perspectives, point out in my video.

Power as a linkage Between Politics and Social media

Jamileh Kadivar is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.

As a person who has studied Political science before and is familiar with some terms and aspects of politics, finding a way to make a connection between my previous knowledge and experience with new studies of social media seemed difficult at the beginning.

At first, I thought that I had started in a completely new era with new terms which are completely different from what I knew. In some aspects this view was correct and I felt like Alice in Wonderland, but I found the missing linkage between these two different eras in “power”. I learnt about surveillance, especially government surveillance, internet surveillance and counter-surveillance in social media, and I understood that social media can be useful for political analysis too.

“Power” plays a key role in politics and many scholars believe politics is a science of power; power to control others. In social media, and the internet and web 2.0 also, power is an important factor. Boersma has stressed many writers and scholars believe that it is important to go beyond dystopian and utopian approaches and see the internet as a field that is shaped by power and conflicting interest. (2012, 300) New media restructured the way panoptic power works and is executed. Castells believes internet surveillance is a technology of control (Castells 2001, 171).

As Fuchs et al. have stressed "the working of web 2.0" is based on the collection, storage, usage, and analysis of a huge amount of personal data. Therefore discussing privacy, - and surveillance- implications of web 2.0 and political, economic, and the cultural dimensions of privacy and surveillance on web 2.0 becomes an important task (2012, 5). Many people may think that only citizens in authoritarian regimes are living under surveillance and all aspects of their lives are under the gaze and control of the police and security forces. But, nowadays it is obvious that surveillance without informed contest is pervasive and universal in the real and virtual world. Mathiesen has mentioned what is new now is surveillance that is hidden, unseen, and impossible to trace. (2012, xix) The internet leads to more surveillance of various forms. (Boersma 2012, 305)

The more we know about surveillance, the more we fear and worry about our privacy and also our security. I was triggered many times by these questions: who has access to my information and the contents of my platforms? How is this information collected, classified and sorted? What aspects of this information are used by them? Why do they use my private information? Who has access to my information in different platforms? And for whom is this information being collected?

And finally, my questions are being led back to the key term that I mentioned in the beginning; “power” which is hidden in the hands of the governments or big companies. We prepare contents free for them and are happy that they have created these platforms freely for us!

References: 

Fuchs, Christian et al. (2012) Internet and Surveillance, London: Routledge.

Castells, Manuel. (2001) The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford university press.