SOCY 20241 - New Media - Week 6 Presentation

1. Surveillance and
Expropriation of
Information
JIA HUI DAI
JAMES BRIGHT

2. Web 2.0 – Prosumption and Surveillance
Focus on - data sharing
- communication
- community
- co-production
It is mass communication and self-sommunication .

3. Fuchs, C. (2010). Web 2.0, prosumption, and
surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 8(3), 288-309
•Web 2.0” platforms and their economic organisation
•Transformation of the internet - information to communication
•Tim O’Reilly’s definition of “Web 2.0” – “Network as a platform,
spanning all connected devices…”
•Fuch’s different view on “Web 2.0” – claims need to be more
modest?

4. Google Buzz – directed connected to GMail
Commercial social networking sites - storing, analyzing, and selling individual
and aggregated data about user preferences and user behaviour to advertising
clients in order to accumulate capital
Function- creating postings that are shared with contacts;
sharing of images and videos;
commenting on and evaluating others’ Buzz posts;
forwarding of Twitter messages to a Buzz account;
linking and integrating images uploaded to Flickr or Picasa, videos uploaded to
YouTube, and posts generated on Blogger; and use of Buzz via mobile phones

5. Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic
surveillance.
It gathers information about user behaviour and user
interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to
advertising clients.
These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the
Buzz privacy policy.

6. Goggles
An image recognition software that identifies objects that people take pictures
of by mapping these objects with Google’s image database and then provides
information about these objects.
Allows humans to intrude the privacy of others in public spaces through
personal identification
Also allows Google to gather, assess, provide, and potentially sell real time data
about the physical location of millions of people.

7. Surveillance by nation states and corporations aims at controlling the
behaviour of individuals and groups.
Ogura’s (2006) and Gandy’s (1993) argues that a common
characteristic of surveillance is the management of population based
on capitalism and/or the nation state, we can distinguish between
economic and political surveillance as the two major forms of
surveillance.

8. How does Web 2.0 make a profit?
Web 2.0 is largely a commercial, profit-oriented machine that
exploits users by commodifying their personal data and usage
behaviour and subjects these data to economic surveillance so that
capital is accumulated with the help of targeted personalized
advertising.

9. Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure

10. •Outline of article
•What has been enabled by the introduction of WIFI
•The internet ‘cloud’ – Gmail and Google documents enabled with
large amounts of storage space on Google servers for personal
information

11. ‘Computing is moving off your machine
and into the cloud’ (Tanz, 2007)
“Cloud” computing is one in which users will rely on privatized
communication networks and data storage facilities to access and
manage an array of goods and services, from personal documents
and music files to online shopping and e-mail.
Gmail and Google documents - provide users with large amounts of
storage space on Google’s servers to store their personal documents
and correspondence.

12. However,
Google reserves the right to mine its rapidly
expanding databases for commercial purposes.

13. •Collection of information has economic value
•Andrejevic argues that “digital enclosure” is a more appropriate
way to name the internet cloud, as a way of theorising about
the “forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by
ubiquitous interactivity.”

14. Digital enclosures:
The model of digital enclosure Is a way of theorizing the forms of productivity
and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity. The model of enclosure
traces the relationship between a material, spatial process with two examples:
• Google’s proposed business model for equipping the city of San Francisco with
free wireless internet access,
•Different levels of enclosures operate with varying levels of symmetry and
transparency – e.g. Amazon
• The use of the interactive capability of the internet to enforce increasingly
restrictive intellectual property regimes.

15. •The end of the article explains how this era of digital enclosure isn’t
based on a loss of privacy but on the expansion in the form of private
control – e.g. telephony
•Private control – Chinese blogger Zhao Jing – blog was taken offline by
government
•Internet – free expression? Or expression reliant on private
cooperation’s?

16. o The forms of productive data gathering enabled by private
ownership of and control over interactive enclosures, wired or
wireless, that render an increasing array of spaces interactive.
o The model of enclosure highlights the ongoing importance of
structures of ownership and control over productive resources in
determining the role they play.
o A form of exploitation.

17. References:
Karatani, Kojin. 2005. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fernback, Jan and Zizi Papacharissi. 2007. Online privacy as legal safeguard: the relationship
among consumer, online portal, and privacy policies. New Media & Society 9 (5): 715-734.
Ogura, Toshimaru. 2006. Electronic government and surveillance-oriented society. In Theorizing
surveillance, ed. David Lyon, 270-295. Portland, OR: Willan
Tanz, J. (2007). Desktop, R.I.P. Wired, 15.04, March. http://www.wired.com/
wired/archive/15.04/wired40_rip.html. Last accessed April 10, 2007
Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Andrejevic, Mark. "Surveillance in the digital enclosure." The Communication Review 10.4
(2007): 295-317.