This article discussed the prevalence/role of online surveillance in contemporary society. In particular, the article looks at how data gathering agencies use their information in risk management strategies and examines how this plays a role in power relations. He notes that there are three main categories of cyberspace surveillance that relate to: 1) employment, 2) to security and policing, and 3) to marketing. He also notes that the line between these categories is blurred as they are connected and often share information.
As previously stated, all forms of surveillance share the common goal of risk management. By collecting data, analyzing trends and generating predictions based upon those trend the surveillant can attempt to influence events in order to create a more desirable future for themselves. In the employment aspect of surveillance, employers monitor the online activities of their employees as a way of maximizing the efficiency of their workers. SurfWatch determined that the three categories accounting for the largest portions of non-work surfing were general news, sexually explicit material, and investment information. It is estimated that this non-work surfing costs companies approximately $450 million annually. If a company’s data reveals that a particular worker is using company time to visit porn sites then they can eliminate him and thusly reduce the risk of employees using company time unproductively. This provides a good example of the panopticon in that since employees know that they are being watched then they are less likely to engage in unproductive activities for fear of punishment.
The security and policing aspect of surveillance is also panoptic for the same reasons. Whether the surveillance is real or imagined the potential threat of punishment deters those who would use the internet for some misdoing. However, this aspect of internet surveillance can also be viewed as being representative of biopower as it also concerns itself with managing populations through the protection of life.
The marketing aspect of surveillance is the most prevalent form of surveillance on the internet today and it is likely that not one of us have escaped its gaze. Unlike the other two forms of surveillance this aspect of surveillance is much less insidious. Marketing groups typically keep track of aggregate data rather than personal data in order to extract meaningful patterns and trends. This essentially allows them to microtarget their customer base and provide “mass customization” to their consumers. Unlike the previous aspects of surveillance this more indicative of biopower than disciplinary power.
The author also discusses the two major concerns regarding the outcomes of surveillance. The first these concerns is that surveillance produces social inequality and thus access and exclusion. One of the ways in which this social inequality is evident is in that the observers in the employment aspect of surveillance often goes unobserved though it is also evident in the fact that it marginalizes the socially disadvantaged by maintaining a barrier between consumer and non-consumer. The second concern regards the invasion of privacy on identity and human dignity. This is as a result of the person being unable to control communication of information about his or her own self. He claims that these two aspects should not be viewed as separate from each other but instead as being two sides of the same coin. To make their relationship clear he states “Identification and identity, for example, may be the means of inclusion and exclusion. Personhood is realized in participation.”
The author also notes that beyond the questions of participation and personhood lie some
further concerns about the nature of contemporary cyberspace surveillance. The kinds of issues just discussed assume that modern discourses of human rights and social justice still hold true in the world of the internet. However, he states that the internet has been implicated in certain cultural shifts that call this into question. The author states that surveillance practices are not so much a threat to the "privacy" of an individual subject, but are actually involved in the very constitution of subjects and that this puts a new slant on surveillance.
This new slant, he argues, has risk management at its core. He claims that this could be seen as “post-disciplinary” situation where the quest for efficiency has become the primary concern. The “mythical goal” of this surveillance, he argues, is to draw predictions from correlations and social data.
Although the author argues that surveillance is a negative aspect of the internet I would argue that he overlooked its capacity for good. If a government were to use this technology to map public opinions and respond to them in an appropriate manner than this technology could be a very useful tool for democracy.
Unfortunately, this is not the case and most often the data that is collected is simply used to measure how well the spread of propaganda is working.
Which aspect of internet surveillance concerns you the most? Why?
Additional Resources
Little Brother is Watching You
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v9n2/brother.html
Data Mining the Kids
http://utoronto.academia.edu/SaraGrimes/Papers/99368/Data_Mining_the_Kids_Surveillance_and_Market_Research_Strategies_in_Childrens_Online_Games
Communication and the Control Revolution
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:m86WVScmCngJ:maghis.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/4/10.full.pdf+the+control+revolution+pdf&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgBiJyOdYJL8hlxI3mKb-EkFxQMxwa5xF16rLy-DrHrGsUVBvGYs8PmD79ScnkY3LHX7l-wENjMQ82Ag_IYbbeIPRAnD5agyJSp9qcMoTyhk86CMuQP60imOX75GLEuqWFJKvFv&sig=AHIEtbRSS39jVJnR8imghmGf4R-VeKmMEA
Online Surveillance Software/Data Mining
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKpD7MC22I
FACEBOOK: Federal Human Data Mining Program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwnTWZ1-UWY
The Face Behind Facebook/Is Facebook your Friend?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPX2UrXcFpo&feature=related
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Critical Response: Immaterial Labour 2.0
This article discusses the emergence, production and exploitation of what the authors call “immaterial labour 2.0”. The concept of immaterial labour refers to two aspects of labour, according to Lazzarato. These aspects are: “1. as regards the ‘informational content’ of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication).’ 2. ‘As regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’-–in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.”
This article concerned itself with the second manifestation of immaterial labour, the production of “cultural content”. It proposes that we are seeing the emergence of a new type of immaterial labour, immaterial labour 2.0, which the authors claim is “a more accelerated, intensified, and indeed inscrutable variant of the kind of activity initially proposed by Lazzarato”. What the “2.0” addresses is the “free” labour that subjects engage in on a cultural and biopolitical level when they participate on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Additionally, it refers to the corporate mining and selling of usergenerated content, which includes tastes, preferences and the general cultural content constructed therein. Their primary interest was in regards to how we “work” amidst the myriad of interfaces within information and communication technology and how the digital construction of our subjectivity/identity within such social networks is a constitutive practice of immaterial labour 2.0.
They suggest that we, as a society, have shifted from our roles as static couch potatoes to the more dynamic roles of websurfers and blogger. They further explain that capital has paid attention to this and that there has been a shift in what is being valorized. With the internet and specifically, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook the dynamic of immaterial labour is the links, the networks that people construct and participate in that comprise not a new audience commodity but immaterial labour 2.0. They note that the very notion of immaterial labour seems nonsensical unless you are willing to consider that there has been a conflation between production and consumption, leisure and labour and author and audience.
The authors present MySpace as being exemplary of immaterial labour 2.0 through its composition, management and regulation of the activities of its users and the use of usergenerated content to produce revenue. MySpace users continually produce free immaterial labour in the construction of their online subjectivity. MySpace exploits this freely given immaterial labour by selling the information gleaned from its users to third parties, who use it to micro target their customer base. The aggregate data collected is a highly useful and sought-after commodity for marketers, who compile extensive databases containing information on the users preferences from which they are then able to extract meaningful patterns and relationships.
I found the topics and concepts discussed in this article to be both very interesting and confusing. I never really thought about how sites such as MySpace and Facebook really benefited from me posting a profile or how what I was doing could constitute labour. I’m still not sure whether this new form of immaterial labour is exploitative or not. The relationship between the user and the site seems to be one that is very mutualistic. However, this is something that is usually true of most forms of organized labour. However, this does seemingly drive home the point that there is no longer a distinction between leisure and labour.
In what way would you describe the relationship between Web 2.0 users and the capitalist economy. Is this relationship parasitic, commensalistic or mutualistic?
Additional Resources:
Data Mining the Kids
http://utoronto.academia.edu/SaraGrimes/Papers/99368/Data_Mining_the_Kids_Surveillance_and_Market_Research_Strategies_in_Childrens_Online_Games
FACEBOOK: Federal Human Data Mining Program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwnTWZ1-UWY
The Face Behind Facebook/Is Facebook your Friend?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPX2UrXcFpo&feature=related
This article concerned itself with the second manifestation of immaterial labour, the production of “cultural content”. It proposes that we are seeing the emergence of a new type of immaterial labour, immaterial labour 2.0, which the authors claim is “a more accelerated, intensified, and indeed inscrutable variant of the kind of activity initially proposed by Lazzarato”. What the “2.0” addresses is the “free” labour that subjects engage in on a cultural and biopolitical level when they participate on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Additionally, it refers to the corporate mining and selling of usergenerated content, which includes tastes, preferences and the general cultural content constructed therein. Their primary interest was in regards to how we “work” amidst the myriad of interfaces within information and communication technology and how the digital construction of our subjectivity/identity within such social networks is a constitutive practice of immaterial labour 2.0.
They suggest that we, as a society, have shifted from our roles as static couch potatoes to the more dynamic roles of websurfers and blogger. They further explain that capital has paid attention to this and that there has been a shift in what is being valorized. With the internet and specifically, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook the dynamic of immaterial labour is the links, the networks that people construct and participate in that comprise not a new audience commodity but immaterial labour 2.0. They note that the very notion of immaterial labour seems nonsensical unless you are willing to consider that there has been a conflation between production and consumption, leisure and labour and author and audience.
The authors present MySpace as being exemplary of immaterial labour 2.0 through its composition, management and regulation of the activities of its users and the use of usergenerated content to produce revenue. MySpace users continually produce free immaterial labour in the construction of their online subjectivity. MySpace exploits this freely given immaterial labour by selling the information gleaned from its users to third parties, who use it to micro target their customer base. The aggregate data collected is a highly useful and sought-after commodity for marketers, who compile extensive databases containing information on the users preferences from which they are then able to extract meaningful patterns and relationships.
I found the topics and concepts discussed in this article to be both very interesting and confusing. I never really thought about how sites such as MySpace and Facebook really benefited from me posting a profile or how what I was doing could constitute labour. I’m still not sure whether this new form of immaterial labour is exploitative or not. The relationship between the user and the site seems to be one that is very mutualistic. However, this is something that is usually true of most forms of organized labour. However, this does seemingly drive home the point that there is no longer a distinction between leisure and labour.
In what way would you describe the relationship between Web 2.0 users and the capitalist economy. Is this relationship parasitic, commensalistic or mutualistic?
Additional Resources:
Data Mining the Kids
http://utoronto.academia.edu/SaraGrimes/Papers/99368/Data_Mining_the_Kids_Surveillance_and_Market_Research_Strategies_in_Childrens_Online_Games
FACEBOOK: Federal Human Data Mining Program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwnTWZ1-UWY
The Face Behind Facebook/Is Facebook your Friend?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPX2UrXcFpo&feature=related
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)