Skip to main content
NOT AS PRIVATE AS YOU THINK 
By Emmanuel Koutsouras 
Say you are browsing the internet, maybe reading a movie review, looking through amazon to find a video game you want. Then you decide to go on Instagram sometime later and see an ad for something closely related to that movie review or video game. Social media is arguably the largest collective platform of information that the world has ever seen. There probably is not a single person who is completely off the grid. Social media brings people, ideas, thoughts, facts, and opinions together, in a way that nothing else can do. People put so much of their personal information on the various social media platforms, assuming safety as a given. As is the case with most things in life, nothing is a guarantee, though. The power of surveillance, which when you think about it is truly disturbing is “that people whose personal data are collected or observed may not know when or if they are being watched” (Humphreys, 2008).  
 
The process of surveillance is typically carried out across multiple systems, bureaucracies, and social connections all converging into “surveillant assemblages” and embedded within everyday life (Lyon, Haggerty, & Ball, 2012). Social media sites are increasingly resembling such assemblages, as they draw in data on user activity elsewhere on the internet via “cookies” and other tracking mechanisms, this how you see ads for things on social media you were looking up on a different website (like a video game on amazon), and from other sources of information on users, such as retailer loyalty cards, customer surveys, and smartphone location traces. Surveillance is an ancient social process, such as guards for buildings during ancient times, but in the late twentieth century, surveillance became a central organizing social practice, affecting power dynamics, institutional practice, and interpersonal relations. Alongside changing technology, this transformation was driven by factors including increasing managerialism, greater public perception of risk, and political expediency. 
Some factors need to be taken in to account when considering an instance of social media surveillance. Who is carrying it out? A business dealing with customers, or profiling and marketing to potential customers? A community of individuals? What are the power relations between the surveillers and the surveilled? What kinds of data are being collected, and by what means? These might include narrative reports, audiovisual recordings, or activity traces, relating to public, personal, private, sensitive, or intimate situations. In this day in age, all of this now takes place via social media. The rapid development of computing technologies, and the social, political, and economic practices that have shaped and been shaped by this development, is one of the most significant enablers of social media surveillance. Regularly, whole sites or individual profiles are hacked, resulting in private information being released to the public. Recall the mass hacking of iCloud in 2015, in which a number of celebrities had their personal pictures stolen and uploaded to public sites. However, it is not just hackers that can get access to private information. Police investigators will use the law to allow them to collect information from a site, which would otherwise have been considered private information. This is information for everyone. College students need to pay extra attention to this. Your career might be saved.  


References 
Ball, K., Haggerty, K. D., & Lyon, D. (27 mar 2012). Surveillance as biopower. Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. 
Humphreys, L. (2008). Who's Watching Whom? A Field study of Interactive Technology and Surveillance. Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, 1-26. Retrieved from Communication and Mass Media Complete database. 

Word count: 536 


Comments

  1. KHSeptember 14, 2018 at 9:27 AM

    Emmanuel,

    This is a fine topic for your post. It clearly fits with your group's "theme week" and addresses the rise of surveillance regimes within and through digital technology.

    So far, so good.

    However, there are several glaring problems with your post. First, you haven't used our "house style" for these essays – something we've talked about often and at length in class and via email.

    Second, your use of APA reference style is likewise prone to error. Seems you haven't consulted the reference resources we've discussed throughout the semester.

    Third, and most critically, there are several passages that are clearly NOT your own words. Rather, they are taken straight from published work without attribution. This is UNACCEPTABLE and could lead to disciplinary action.

    I suggest you review the university's policy on such matters. After all, if you are violating procedure for this assignment, you may be doing in your other course work. And that could lead to some real problems.

    In sum, you haven't followed directions very closely, despite repeated guidance to do so. What's more, you are flirting with issues of academic integrity that could have serious consequences.

    15/30 pts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NOBODY CAN HIDE FROM MENTAL HEALTH

By Graham Jaeger Mental Health has played a major role in schools across the country for over the past decade. Each and every year, students feel more and more pressure as they have to adapt from their summer into new school routines (Suldo, Shaunessy, Hardesty, 2008). Students suffer from mental health largely because of stress, but other factors such as addiction, rape, and even school violence are heavy contributors as well. A perfect example of mental health issues within high school students is displayed in the Netflix television series titled 13 Reasons Why . Throughout this show, you see depression take over kids lives which ultimately has a huge impact on the rest of the students in the show. 13 Reasons Why received a lot of criticism because suicide rates in teens rapidly increased after the show was released. Many say it was due to the connection they could feel with Hannah throughout the show, and others felt like they were in her position where they felt it was the only...
5 comments
Read more

WHAT MADE THE L WORD SO GROUNDBREAKING?

By Pia Ocvirk Historically, lesbian characters have been virtually non-existent on American television. Ellen DeGeneres’s televised coming out on her popular show Ellen in 1997 paved the way for lesbian characters in primetime television. Despite the gains made for lesbian characters, they were and still are, more often than not, portrayed in heterosexual narratives and tailored almost solely for a heterosexual audience (Lee & Meyer, 2010). When The L Word premiered on Showtime in 2004, the show became the first ever to feature the main cast of exclusively queer women, most of whom were lesbians. Written, created and directed by women for women, the show told stories that had never before been seen on television (Bendix, 2017). The L Word touched on subjects such as same-sex parenting, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” addiction, cancer, disability, coming out and, most importantly, the heterosexual male gaze. The L Word made the male gaze a central issue in its first two season...
1 comment
Read more

JOCK STEREOTYPES IN FILM

By Chase Andries It is common when people think of a jock today, the majority imagine an athlete. An athlete who is successful in their sport, aggressive, violent, arrogant, unintelligent, dim-witted, and foolish; a powerful figure in their society who thinks they are untouchable and above everyone else. American film mirrors these same ideas and principles in our culture today. The characters that play the athletes regularly share the same characteristics as the “typical jock” we think of in our society. For example, in the movie, 17 again starring Zac Efron, is a character named Stan. Stan is the captain of the basketball team, a delinquent, and a bully who follows the stereotypes of being aggressive, unintelligent, and violent which is displayed throughout the film. Stan is clearly the athletic jock from start to finish, but there seems to be an underlying stigma that factors into his character the audience may not realize. In the movie , the main protagonist na...
3 comments
Read more