You do not have to be in security or policing to conduct serious surveillance. Any laptop offers access to intimate, business or criminal aspects of almost anyone’s life. Ada Calhoun, for instance, found out early that as someone often given the tabloid task of finding out about people who had just died, social media were a boon. As news broke of the 2011 shooting of American Democratic member of Congress Gabrielle Giffords, for example, she quickly found the alleged shooter’s MySpace page, a photo in a local newspaper and a YouTube manifesto. Indeed, ‘any original trace of information … could be a place to start tracking down someone’s bitter ex-girlfriend or paranoid self-published novel’.1
With no training in private detection, anyone can easily find out a lot about people not known to them, for whatever purpose. This chapter explores how this happens, from the viewpoint of those for whom watching has become a way of life. I doubt that a large proportion of those who do the kind of ‘social surveillance’ discussed in this chapter have a professional – or even macabre – obsession with finding out about recent deaths. But many internet users find that social media are a key means of finding out about what is happening in the lives of their friends, not to mention strangers with whom they had no prior connection. It is a mundane matter.
However, while social media do supply the much-needed means for keeping in touch with others, the research indicates that face-to-face contact is still vital to deeper relationships. Indeed, the order of events is often the other way round: people use the technology to maintain contact with those already known to them. As for checking out strangers, more investigation is needed. Some of this may be idle curiosity or the fascination of following apparent links. Another part relates to so-called fandom, snooping on celebrities. In neither case will there be any intention to attempt developing a friendship with those under such private surveillance.
Watching is now a way of life, and nowhere is this more clearly seen than in everyday online activities. As we shall see, this did not come from nowhere. Television culture in a sense prepared the way. And, of course, it is not just ‘watching’. Communication occurs, especially on sites that permit direct messaging – above all, texting. Watching others is part of the story, but becoming visible to others watching is the other part. Chatting, playing or arguing about politics or religion are ancient pastimes. What is new is the wider audience for such activities, with members able to join in or comment.
Social media writ large, including sites where people create personal profiles, post photos and videos, participate in networked gaming, share links to memes, comment on news stories and gossip with friends and family, are a key context for considering the devices and desires relating to such watching. True, in the early days of digital exploration, cyberspace was often conceived as a separate sphere from ‘real’ life. Within a few years the conceptual gap narrowed as it became apparent that cyberspace had actually taken root within everyday life. In the shift from online to onlife, rather than thinking of digital communication as an activity where wariness of being watched was warranted, it became a zone where people wanted to be watched. To be watched was to be seen, acknowledged, perhaps even recognized, a space where status could be affirmed.2
As people become immersed in life online, or – as networked devices have become embedded in the lived environment and taken up within the context of everyday interactions – onlife, their sense of the social is being shaped in new ways, and surveillance is just one aspect of this. On the one hand, surveillance by commercial organizations is in tension with their consumers’ behaviour, where being free to choose is the watchword. On the other, ‘social surveillance’, initiated by users, expresses, among other things, consumer behaviour, where desires to look good to or compete with others or even to be a celebrity are prominent. The cultural currents from online to onlife are thus marked by profound ambivalence.
So the surveillance imaginaries and practices associated with onlife differ only in some specific ways from those that might be met at the airport, in the workplace, or simply when walking down the street. You may assume that they are or feel like quite different contexts, until the US border official wants to check your Instagram account. The changes here connect most clearly with issues of what human life entails in a digital era, how subjective experiences are tweaked and how identities are formed. The ambiguities of being watched and watching others, now digitally deepened, affect social relationships and responsibilities in ways that are just becoming apparent.
This chapter begins with the turn towards more participatory activities online and its possible consequences for surveillance culture, particularly in the ways that desire features so strongly in a world of devices. There are initiatory as well as responsive practices here. The former are associated with social surveillance, the latter with consumer surveillance. So the question is not just why so many users allow their data to be seen and used by others but, also, why people engage in high-tech but small-scale surveillance themselves.
In order to understand this properly, however, a bit of background is needed. Conventionally, the sorts of issues discussed here – under what circumstances should personal data be available to others and how far is it appropriate and possible to limit such access? – were thought of, at least in the Western world, as questions of surveillance and privacy. How did this change during the twentieth century, in everyday imaginaries and practices surrounding earlier technologies of communication such as radio and television? This background offers some insights into why social media and gaming have been taken up so enthusiastically today.
Even with such a background, however, some find it hard to imagine why, when social media and gaming seem so surveillant, ordinary users would apparently give up their personal data so freely and fully. This, which we have already met earlier, is often called the ‘privacy paradox’. Once again it recalls the language that became culturally important in widespread ways in the twentieth century. Here, while we recognize that, for some, the privacy paradox seems real, we shall also try to relieve it of some of its paradoxical character.
In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the privacy paradox must be re-evaluated. The stimulus and incentive to share all manner of texts and images online despite what we now know about the organizational appetite for personal data may seem paradoxical. Here is the central question: Why do people permit their personal data to circulate within internet companies, especially in social media, when those data are made available to both marketing corporations and to government departments or police agencies?
To answer this question we shall focus on social media and gaming to discover the specific directions that they have taken. So we examine ‘social surveillance’ as a phenomenon in which the opportunities for watching others are appropriated by users. Who is doing surveillance – if that is the right word – now? And as for gaming, we explore this briefly, too, to discover the commercial driver that also uses the coin of personal data in yet another realm where desires are patently powerful and devices facilitate their fulfilment.
Having done that, we shall be in a better position to consider the meaning of these shifts. There are two key areas to consider. First is whether the desires, such as to be seen, really mean that we now ‘love Big Brother’. John McGrath argued an important case, that surveillance may be both enjoyable and desirable,3 but we also have to ask about the relevance of other concepts, to be explained in a moment, such as scopophilia, narcissism, soft surveillance and the outsourced self. Each has been proposed as a way of thinking about the privacy paradox – of why people so freely give up their personal data in a surveilled world.
The second area to return to is this: in the world of social media, where apparently voluntary engagement with checking and tracking is commonplace and therefore unexceptional, is it still correct to speak of ‘surveillance’ and ‘privacy’? Are there other ways of understanding this that help us grasp the actual imaginaries and practices of social media and gaming? What happens when ordinary users have their say about what they are doing and thinking? Do these signal a new era of ‘post-surveillance’ and ‘post-privacy’, or is that going too far?
The realization that some might knowingly and willingly participate in surveillance began to dawn before social media were invented. One of the first to comment on new ways of thinking about surveillance in which people play an active role in the production of images was Hille Koskela, writing about reality TV, mobile phone images and, in a phrase that already sounds quaint, ‘home webcams’.4 Without diminishing the need for traditional analyses of surveillance, she proposed that the novel practices – ‘empowering exhibitionism’, she called them – associated with these new media present strong reasons for rethinking surveillance, in terms of new forms of looking, seeing, presenting and circulating images.
Not long after, when social media were still a novelty, some started to note the ‘fun features and entertainment values’ of surveillance5 and also drew attention to the participatory forms of surveillance that were becoming available on social networking sites.6 They also concluded that in such contexts, surveillance could be ‘potentially empowering, subjectivity-building and even playful’. Rightly critical of views that separate online from offline social life, Anders Albrechtslund suggests that, in this context, surveillance is seen not as controlling or disempowering but in much more positive ways that are wrapped up with the socializing that gives social media their attraction.
While acknowledging that other assessments of online surveillance see possibilities for amplifying already-existing commercial or state surveillance, Albrechtslund shows that social media users are likely to see things differently. They are constructing their identities through self-revelation – even exhibitionism – and through monitoring others in an ongoing way. Checking up on information that others share is vital to the social life that makes social media hum. In other words, online surveillance as understood through the imaginaries and practices of its users is not necessarily as sinister or coercive as its critics might think.
However, the participatory turn may also be seen in a rather different light. For instance, while Julie Cohen freely accepts the futility of trying to regulate online surveillance without taking note of the playful sociability of social media, she also demands that such participation be viewed in a larger context.7 For her, the participatory turn occurs within a political-economic shift from the surveillance-industrial complex in which surveillance was seen as a necessary evil, to what she calls a surveillance-innovation complex in which it is viewed as a force for good. With the former, efforts were made to regulate and contain surveillance as something that might constrain civil liberties or invade privacy. But in the latter, surveillance moves into a context where it is seen as exempt from social and legal control.
Commercial surveillance environments are positioned as places of play and gaming. Foursquare, Groupon and Nike+ are all examples used by Cohen to show how game-playing encourages the engagement of users to increase their level of data-sharing via rewards systems, to facilitate targeted marketing and to keep them returning to the site. And, of course, other kinds of social media also rely on similar strategies to retain their users. Facebook and others send constant reminders to intermittent or occasional users, telling them that their activity level is low or that they have missed many messages or posts.
So what are appropriate ways to evaluate the participatory turn? Clearly, cultural shifts include the apparent collusion, at least with consumer surveillance, by ordinary users who may seek the best deals or simply engage with new media to position themselves favourably in their social world. A certain playfulness has to be acknowledged along with actual game-playing that has also become a leading online pastime. Failing to appreciate the ways in which participation is a central feature of online practices, framed by fresh imaginaries of what online life signifies, will mean missing the meaning of surveillance today.
At the same time, everyday involvement in social media in their multifarious dimensions does not occur in a political-economic vacuum. There is a price to pay, even for ‘free’ services and platforms, and that, as many warn, is that those users and consumers may not realize that they are in fact the commodity or, in another realm, the suspect. Their surveillance imaginaries and practices also make a difference to how well the systems that construct subjects as commodities or suspects actually work. So the question then becomes, with what sorts of knowledgeability do so-called users participate in social media and gaming. What sorts of concerns characterize their assessment of the media that absorb social life today?
First let us look at the ways in which desire is expressed, before considering how this point was reached, historically.
Little did Thomas Cranmer, sixteenth-century author of the General Confession in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, imagine that five centuries later a ‘device’ would be a common noun for an electronic gadget carried in one’s pocket. In his day, it meant something negative, an underhand stratagem, a trick or a falsehood, a mask, rather than a machine. Thus it twinned neatly with ‘desires’, which could also hold sinful significance – it was in a confession, after all – in the prayer: ‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts’. By the end of the twentieth century, P. D. James’s brilliant detective thriller Devices and Desires made the engineering connection with ‘devices’, but the desires still connote the dispositions of the possible murderers.
The story told here is one in which apparently negative surveillance stratagems can become the object of very strong desires. Culturally, there is a turn from a much more Orwell-inflected watching-averse world to one in which being watched is welcome, even to the point that many social media users especially start to watch others more deliberately. Context, as we shall see, has become a critical factor. Our grasp of this will be helped by a key article by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, on the surveillant assemblage,8 in which they in turn invoke the insightful studies of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.
Haggerty and Ericson maintain that it is mistaken to think of surveillance only in terms of centrally organized systems, as the Big Brother and panopticon metaphors often do. Rather, fluid forces or ‘flows’ work with mutating ‘assemblages’ of items that come together simply to operate systems of power – Facebook and the US Department of Homeland Security would be examples – quite unlike traditional political science models of government. The flows of the surveillant assemblage are secured by desire, which for them is an ‘active, positive force’ – not just a ‘lack’ – in Deleuze and Guattari’s work.9
All sorts of desires come together in today’s surveillant assemblages. As Haggerty and Ericson note, ‘surveillance is driven by the desire to bring systems together, to combine practices and technologies and integrate them into a larger whole’.10 And it does not deal in bodies, traditionally construed, but is seen as a series of signifying flows, brought together so that the body – itself an assemblage – can be known, or rather, reduced to information. Such information, as Mark Poster pointed out, becomes our data double11 which is how we are ‘known’ by marketing companies and government departments. What Poster might not have guessed is the extent to which people are now willing to trade on their data double, to accept benefits of convenience from the loss of control of their double.
As Haggerty and Ericson also note, in what is almost a footnote, wanting to ensure order, control and management may not exhaust the list of desires relating to surveillance. Its ‘voyeuristic entertainment value’, seen in CCTV footage or TV shows like America’s Dumbest Criminals, indicates other dimensions of desire. However, those dimensions are visible in another work by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, where ‘desire is a machine and the object of desire is another machine connected with it’.12
This can translate into a situation where users themselves are desiring machines, connected with other desiring machines, their devices and the apps and platforms found there, suggests Bernard Harcourt.13 Constantly checking for new messages, posts and images, driven to more than nine hours a day online, having a hard time pulling away from the pressure to be always available, always alert to pings and vibrations, these are signs of a culture of desiring machines. For Deleuze and Guattari, the source of much desire lies in this realm as in others; it is consumerism that ‘liberates the flows of desire’.14
Thus all those devices become increasingly present in daily life; users dwell with them, and they want them. As Harcourt says, people enjoy playing with their videos and texting and Facebooking so much that surveillance of all kinds is permitted and fostered. ‘We just want, we just need to be online, to download that app, to have access to our email, to download that selfie.’15 If this is explained by desire, then it must be desire understood as interests, in this case those unleashed by association with consumerism.
Accordingly, desire plays a prominent role in this surveillance imaginary, something unsurprising from the psychoanalytic perspective of Lacan, for whom desire is the very dynamic of human agency.16 This is important, says Charlotte Epstein, because it may, paradoxically, be the reason why privacy remains both a personal and political goal, even though, as Nissenbaum insists, it must be construed contextually. This is discussed further, later in this chapter.
Surveillance often sparks responses relating to privacy. The twentieth-century era of state surveillance, especially read through warnings like Orwell’s, made being watched seem negative, undesirable. Apparently, many aspire to escape, to hide, or just be private. But this approach seems myopic in a world of mass media and now social media. The world of celebrity makes being seen a matter of privilege, of desire. And if the chance for Andy Warhol’s ‘15 minutes of fame’ was limited by TV, social media open the floodgates. The consequences for surveillance are far-reaching – from the unwanted eye to welcome watching. The desire to be seen may help to naturalize and legitimate surveillance of all kinds, to encourage new modes of cooperation of the surveilled with their surveillors. This is facilitated by emerging surveillance imaginaries and practices.
So surveillance culture becomes the new normal. Surveillance is no longer the exceptional circumstance, the last resort, the specific probe it was assumed to be in liberal democratic societies that rely on judicial oversight to protect citizens from overreach. The desire to discover, seen in large-scale surveillance, meets the passion for publicness in social media. How to account for the apparent willingness to be visible to all, especially when there is a growing awareness that our daily routines and whereabouts are tracked and traced constantly? What kinds of desires are visible here and what role do they play in surveillance imaginaries and practices?
Later, we shall look at a range of possible explanations for the new online openness and the supposed shrinking of privacy concerns. As mentioned earlier, they include scopophilia, a love of being seen, narcissism, an excessive interest in oneself or one’s appearance, soft surveillance by consumer businesses, and what Arlie Hochschild calls the outsourced self.17 Here, we consider how this may be part of a larger issue, in which public life has become successively less significant compared with so-called private life, particularly within societies oriented to consuming and celebrity and when assisted by new technologies – especially our ubiquitous devices.
Some historical background illuminates these shifts in earlier surveillance imaginaries and practices. Richard Sennett, for instance, describes large-scale, long-term changes that have occurred since the lively public life of eighteenth-century Paris, where connecting with strangers was seen as a key to becoming ‘social’ or ‘civilized’.18 Such flourishing urban, public life is also visible in nineteenth- and twentieth-century London and New York. But gradually, within increasingly capitalist, secular and urban societies, the idea of the private individual becomes more significant, the personal becomes more ‘authentic’19 and people think they have a right to be ‘left alone’ in public.
In this way, properly public life shrinks as self-absorption expands and as aspects of the private – such as judging the public figure by some ‘true self’ standard – intrude into public performance. The private deflects attention from the importance of involvement in the public realm. Sennett says that the resulting confusion means that people try to work out in terms of personal feeling things that previously belonged in the world of public, impersonal codes.
Today, however, the public, paradoxically, has altered again. Public and private realms merge in new ways online and in social media. What was once considered private is now shared in the public realm. Performing, even play-acting, are vital here.20 The trend probably began with television, however. As Joshua Meyrowitz suggests, mid-twentieth century communication technologies facilitated a fresh sense of social space, separated in new ways from physical space.21 Other people’s living spaces and domestic relationships could now be viewed in one’s own living room, for instance. You did not have to be there to see it.
Erving Goffman’s old assumptions about roles having two sides, a ‘public face’ to the audience and a ‘private face’ in the ‘backstage’ area,22 had to be revised, along with Marshall McLuhan’s on ‘informational contexts’.23 It is not now the urban space so much as the electronic space or the informational setting that becomes significant. Social positions – such as age, gender and authority – become much more fluid. How could parents persuade children that ‘this is the way things are done’ when radio and television told a much more varied story? The new media, as McLuhan insisted, make a difference to social behaviour; Meyrowitz seeks to demonstrate how.
This electronic blurring of public and private spaces24 and the weakened link between physical location and social experience contribute to the increasing liquidity of contemporary culture. As well, Meyrowitz suggests, it stimulated the eventual use of much more interactive media, including self-display on social networking sites. A further telling insight is that familiarity with television as a watching machine helped pave the way for greater tolerance of ‘pervasive government, corporate and populace surveillance’.25
The same process, then, could be responsible for both permitting pullulating surveillance and, suggests R. Jay Magill, making privacy seem ‘somehow miserly’.26 Magill also points to radio and television as a means of bringing things that are far away, or known only to the imagination, into the public sphere. This allowed President Roosevelt to have ‘fireside chats’ with the American people, or the British King George V to broadcast a Christmas Day message to the people in 1932 – thus paving the way early on for what would one day be called social media.
At the same time, other analogies and analyses throw additional light on surveillance imaginaries and practices seen as sharing, publicly. Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, has a slightly different take on the business of online display and the creation of a fuzzier line between public and private. For him, certain TV shows amount to a cult of confession. They encourage participants to ‘open up’, to wear their hearts on their sleeves, sharing in the TV studio things that once would have been seen as necessarily intimate.
While for Sennett this would destructively destabilize the public realm, Bauman suggests that, today, the group actually obliges public confession by individuals. That would be seen as the route, paradoxically, to true community.27 Bauman sees the confessional society as both the triumph and the betrayal of privacy. While privacy may have invaded the public realm it has also arrived there shorn of secrets, especially in the world of often intimate ‘sharing’.28
Few first-time social media users realize they are signing up for surveillance. But it happens and is soon apparent. People seeking flexibility, mobility and connectivity through social media also find themselves tracked and recorded using the same media. They soon see banner ads on the screen that eerily relate to a site they sought only a short time earlier. Social media may offer a broader ‘community’ of sorts, but individuals are also tied into abstract systems that track and monitor consumption, mobility, behaviours. Little wonder, then, that in the wake of 9/11 the newly minted US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quickly moved to using Facebook as a source of personal data, very soon after the fledgling platform was launched.
Homeland Security surveillance exists in the same space as Facebook surveillance. Each is a product of the late, or, better, liquid29 modern world and in this environment surveillance is both organizationally and culturally central today. This liaison expresses how both government and commercial organizations work but it is also how we have come to think and to live. Today’s culture of surveillance goes far beyond fearing no-fly lists or being aware of terrorist hotlines. It lives, equally, in social media. While these two may appear to be quite different realms of life, they grow in the same soil, thrive in the same conditions and, crucially, are vitally connected.
One way of thinking about the relationship between Homeland Security and Facebook involves the television connection again: in Homeland Security, the few watch the many, in TV the many watch the few,30 but in social media, the many watch the many. When in an early phase of Homeland Security activities the idea of ‘total information awareness’ was initiated, the rather sinister image used was of an eye in a pyramid whose vision radiated out to the globe. The message? That this all-seeing eye will detect your presence wherever in the world you are. However, if you opened Facebook at that time you saw another map of the world, but with individual figures dotted over it and a little line drawn between each, creating a web or network diagram.
It is a mistake to imagine that these two media, Homeland Security – in whatever country and under whatever name – and Facebook, are unconnected products of the same liquid, digital modernity. True, one has the protection of territory, trade and, possibly, citizens in mind, receives its mandate from the highest level of government and can call on the full might of military engagement to support it, while the other is the brainchild of a university undergraduate imagining new ways of letting students network electronically with their ‘friends’, which mushroomed in a decade to boasting more than a billion users. But Facebook hosts a Homeland Security page and Homeland Security makes extensive use of Facebook data.
The DHS finds Facebook and other social media very useful in its investigations. As an Electronic Frontier Foundation freedom of information request revealed in 2010, a memo from Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of DHS, states:
Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.31
In the run-up to President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the DHS monitored social media sites for ‘items of interest’, and although they claimed not to collect personally identifiable information, they also say that anything publicly divulged is fair game.
And on the flip side, Facebook cheerfully states, mimicking, it seems, other Homeland Security practices, that it ‘collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services’. Read the small print! Note too that ‘this information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site’. Indeed, Facebook says it ‘may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship’.32 This is regardless of how high you place your privacy settings.
So much so, in fact, that when Jennifer Stoddart, then Canadian Privacy Commissioner, became aware of the fact that ‘third-party developers of games and other applications on the site had virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users’ personal information’ she launched an investigation into Facebook’s practices. This resulted in a 2010 agreement with Facebook that ‘Applications must now inform users of the categories of data they require to run and seek consent to access and use this data’.33
So Facebook and Homeland Security work similarly. The search model used very successfully by Google, and matched by DHS, was in some ways upstaged by Facebook. Google depended on ‘rigorous and efficient equations’ whereas Facebook saw – and sees – the potential in the ‘social graph’ provided by networks of ‘friends’.34 Google monitors search histories and browsing activities using tracking cookies but Facebook connects with people who use their own names, with real friends, with actual email addresses and users’ real tastes, ideas and news, tracking user profiles.35
Facebook has frequently been questioned or criticized for its privacy policies such that from time to time it upgrades them to ‘allow more user control over the settings’. Naturally enough, those who are concerned about privacy are sure to push all the settings to high. Thus, those beyond friends and family may not learn much directly from what is available on your page. But marketers, and others like DHS that use similar methods, do not care what you yourself say.
You have Facebook friends, perhaps hundreds of them, who unwittingly betray you to whoever has access to Facebook data, such as those corporations that Facebook has told you it shares with. When people use real names and reveal their real preferences, politics and personal beliefs, those using Facebook data believe that they have tabs on you even with your own privacy settings at max. True, few people friend others with whom they have nothing in common. Quite the contrary. At the same time, the ‘realness’ of preferences, politics and personal beliefs may well be qualified by users sharing what they think is expected or, in the case of young people especially, what will display them in a good light. Many of the latter dread being judged for being different. The performance is staged by the site design, imagined or real expectations, and the individual keen to satisfy both. Thus Facebook surveillance meets social surveillance.
At this point, we have to think beyond twentieth-century theorizing such as that done by British sociologist Anthony Giddens. He presciently placed surveillance squarely in his diagram of key institutional areas of modernity,36 and also argued that ‘free speech movements’ act as its countervailing force. But he neither reckoned with the already growing influence of new technologies nor did he foresee the resilience of the neoliberal turn towards consumer capitalism that had been unleashed by US President Reagan and UK Prime Minister Thatcher just a few years before his book came out.
These new technologies and neoliberalism have worked together since to render redundant older notions of surveillance as primarily relating to state activity. It is, as Giddens rightly surmised, a central dimension of modernity but emphatically not now centred solely in the state, although governments everywhere still seek access to personal data, however gathered. And as it happens, as if to confirm part of Giddens’ thesis, contemporary state surveillance has indeed turned out to be a serious threat to free speech. The chilling effects after Snowden are felt by both journalists and ordinary internet users.37 Part of today’s surveillance culture involves, as we saw in chapter 2, convenience, caution and compliance.
But another aspect of surveillance culture involves consumer devices and related communicative desires. No social thinker could have guessed at this departure, though some, such as Philip K. Dick and Herbert Marcuse, came close. Social media exhibit some technological precedents that in hindsight can be seen as preparing the way, but the advent of social media as a communicative platform also presents quite new possibilities and problems. The fact that, viewed with some political-economic and ethical realism, social media must also be thought of in relation to processes such as Homeland Security only adds to the complexity.
So, the later twentieth-century development of information technology reduced labour intensivity and facilitated communication, simultaneously permitting greater surveillance capacities all round. As James Rule observed in his early sociology of surveillance, looking at social security, credit cards and drivers’ licensing,38 new surveillance methods were characterized by greater numbers being surveilled, the amount of information available about each, the subtlety of decision-making achieved, the centrality or interconnectivity of data in the system, the speed of information flow and the points of contact linking systems and individuals.
However, such practices started to spill over into everyday life, although that process of ‘spilling over’ is itself far from innocent. It does not necessarily mean that massive surveillance capacities are open to people in their daily lives. While it is obvious that social media facilitate very sophisticated surveillance by ordinary users, checking personal details of friends or strangers remotely and in real time, such tools do not necessarily empower users in other ways. Hence the mistake of imagining, as some do, that simply to turn cellphones or laptops against established authorities such as government or police somehow redresses an imbalance of power. They are undoubtedly a source of real power, but the equation is a complex one. As we shall see in chapter 6, an examination of actual imaginaries and practices is needed to indicate what possibilities exist for new media in struggles for political power.
People with no experience of using high-tech surveillance may see surveillantly partly because they have been empowered to do so through their own interaction with new technologies. This applies both to visual surveillance and dataveillance, from video cameras to social media. Information technology use expanded massively in twentieth-century organizations, but new media of all kinds also diffused quickly into the minutiae of daily life. In many societies, a large proportion of the population is connected, not only through workplace machines and home computers, but in a major way through cellphones and other devices. This is sometimes more, not less, true of ‘developing’ societies that leapfrog past first adopters.
Social media and electronic games are seldom sold as means of doing ‘surveillance’, but some systems, such as FourSquare and other platforms enabled by GPS or cell towers, such as Facebook’s iPhone app ‘Places’, cheerfully allow people to find their friends in real-time locations. As well, all social media sites encourage users both to circulate personal information and simultaneously to track and trace the activities of others. The implications of this were dramatically thrust into public awareness when Snowden demonstrated that personal information transmitted and stored by internet and telephone companies is accessible to intelligence agencies.
But what sorts of surveillance occur using social media and how does gaming fit into this picture? Curiously, social media are used in several different but not unconnected ways, and gaming, too, has its unexpectedly surveillant side. Social media users as well as the service providers engage in surveillance using social media. Games may facilitate involvement in surveillance under the rubric of fun.
Today many are aware of social media surveillance. The debates are strung along a spectrum from cheery assurances that would please Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who thinks that privacy is passé – unless it affects him personally: he takes great pains to guard the privacy of his own home!39 – through to others who see inescapably sinister signs of influence and control. This is a contradictory trend whose controversial character shows no sign of abating. It is worth reviewing the debate in order to get some perspective.
Several early commentators on social media noted that in this context, while certain classical forms of top-down surveillance are present, other activities also proliferate, involving more mutual forms of surveillance and what Alice Marwick calls ‘social surveillance’.40 However, many question what privacy might mean in a world that celebrates publicity. For instance, in what sounds like an oxymoron, danah boyd speaks of ‘networked privacy’.41 Users upload images of others or share information about others in a routine way, and tools for finding out about others, such as Facebook Graph Search, are available. These are used to mine others’ data and search for patterns. This complicates further the debate over social media and surveillance.
Some of the most interesting studies of this are carried out on the largest user category, twenty- and thirty-somethings. However, social media use often starts with a younger crowd, teens and pre-teens. Valerie Steeves’s findings on children, young people and social media are telling. It is clear that the necessary skills are learned early. They ‘try on new identities and connect with friends’,42 and while actively seeking to avoid the surveillant gaze of parents and teachers, these eleven- to seventeen-year-olds welcome lateral surveillance as a means to discover their identities.
Turning to parental surveillance online, the younger group continues to accept this as ‘care’, whereas the older teens may have their hackles raised against ‘control’: ‘My mom keeps on [posting] me, “You’re on Facebook! Get off! Do your homework!” And I’m like … de-friend.’43 Even though they might be able to see that their parents are trying to protect and support them, they feel they have to work out some things for themselves. But responses to parents are mild compared with their attitude to school filters and other blocking devices. The teens sensed that they were just not trusted within this almost panoptic situation. They liked the networked spaces of social media for the visibility that they offered but baulked at the monitoring.
For Marwick, it is important that what actually happens on social media is understood. She insists that when users closely examine content uploaded by others and look at their own content through others’ eyes, this is surveillance. While acknowledging that this is a variant of more classical understandings of surveillance – in terms of power, hierarchy and reciprocity – it very much counts as surveillance. Everyday social differences contribute to the micro-relations of power, social roles are altered, and people are included and excluded from networks through deliberate sharing or sequestering of information.
As Marwick and others show, users ‘monitor their digital actions with an audience in mind’.44 This is key to the surveillance imaginary in this case. People are watching others and are aware of being watched. Most analysts agree that the latter is a strong sense that other users are watching. They are not necessarily aware that other levels of surveillance – primarily commercial – also affect participants.45 Marwick explores three key areas: the significance of what Nippert-Eng calls ‘boundary work’ – such as home-and-work – where contexts collapse on social media; Facebook stalking, where users do digital digging through others’ material to buttress their position or undermine others; and how participants use social media to be seen.
The effects of such surveillance are not as direct as conventional surveillance effects but social surveillance undoubtedly produces self-surveillance of other users. That the surveilled gaze is internalized may be seen as behaviours are modified with the realization that specific watching occurs. And sometimes the behaviours are simply reinforced. As one of Marwick’s respondents, Mei Xing, observes, ‘with Facebook you know that at that moment a portion of your friends are doing the same things that you are’.46
Social surveillance may seem fairly innocent until one considers the power relations evident within social media surveillance. These become obvious when matters such as gender, race, or the intersections between different kinds of vulnerability are considered. These are magnified in social media settings, as Valerie Steeves and Jane Bailey clearly show in their studies of young women online.47 While they feel the burden of unequal treatment – ‘Boys get away with murder!’ – they also seem to acquiesce to the gendered gaze, and the overvisibility of the feminine body by packaging it as a form of ‘sexual feminine liberation’.
Such insights are valuable as they indicate other ways that surveillance may occur, even without major institutions or organizations being directly involved. The power of the gaze is still evident at this interpersonal level, because it makes a difference. And users who are surreptitiously checking out others, for example, are fully aware of those power relations. A study carried out using international polling showed that up to 30 per cent of social media users in Canada, the US and the UK not only engaged in such ‘stalking’, but imagined that those whose personal information they were poring over would be embarrassed or upset if they knew they were under surveillance in this way.48
However, while it is tremendously important to understand surveillance as it occurs in many domains beyond its classical, conventional sites, it is also vital to note what facilitates that surveillance. Social surveillance is done by ordinary users of social media but is still enabled by some very complex high technology from some of the largest corporations in the world, which use, among other things, algorithms, machine-learning software and facial recognition technology. The opportunities for these kinds of surveillance are provided externally, not from the users and their own capacities to ‘gaze’ or ‘drill down’ into the others’ records, but from organizations with their own purposes and business models.
We drew attention earlier to Daniel Trottier’s Facebook investigation49 where he observes that living in a social media environment is like a dwelling place, somewhere a lot of time is spent doing things with people known to users. But Trottier follows Michel de Certeau’s distinction between owners and dwellers in which the former, unlike the latter, have the capacity to shape and regulate spaces. The dwellers’ tactics describe how the space is used, but in the end the owners determine how the space is known and experienced.50
Trottier looks at four levels of social media use, starting with the lateral or peer-to-peer information exchange known to all users and described by boyd, Marwick and others. But the other levels are the institutions, both corporate and governmental, that monitor populations of interest to them, using social media; the aggregated data-mining of marketers that turns social identities into sortable data; and lastly, police and other investigators such as security agencies, who are covert in their practices. However, the levels are not separate, sealed. They interact dynamically with each other, often ‘mutually augmenting’ their capacities.
All this reveals something of a tension within studies of social media and surveillance. Whereas some, such as Albrechtslund and Dubbeld, highlight the pleasurable and empowering dimensions of such networking, others, notably Mark Andrejevic and Christian Fuchs,51 stress the ‘digital enclosures’ within which all such surveillance, however enjoyable for some, takes place. In this case, the lighthearted fun that is surely present occurs against a less freewheeling backdrop that is also understood by many social media users.
The approach taken here is that, rather than taking sides in a debate that may still involve some talking past each other, it is more constructive to try to understand how the genuine enjoyment of social media may be tempered by the recognition that one also has to negotiate constantly with the medium in order to minimize its negatively surveillant features.52 Might the same be said of online games and the gamifying of other everyday activities?
All sorts of activities, including academic work, may have gamified53 aspects. For instance, ResearchGate, the online scholarly network, operates in game-like ways, offering incentives and rewards for participation. The metrics of academics’ participation are constantly on display and every milestone, such as a hundred reads, twenty-five citations or the periodic addition of new ‘followers’, is greeted with a congratulatory message to the researcher.
At the same time, strong pressure also exists to play the game for everyone’s benefit; you may be a solo operator but you are not alone in the network. If you fail to offer downloadable copies of your work, for instance, constant reminders pester you to do so. And few will have failed to notice that the world of ResearchGate closely mirrors that of the corporate, performance- and metrics-driven university – a reminder that it is not only a game. How long until universities require their faculty to participate in such academic media?54
Play is the name of the game, as theatre director John McGrath observes. While much surveillance is framed in popular thought by fear and risk, relating to crime control, security measures and privacy, this does not exhaust the possible frames. As Jennifer Whitson points out, ‘empowerment, seduction and desire’ are important candidates today.55 She shows, following Erving Goffman, how games should be considered as serious social interaction. They are encounters, with rules and rituals.
Online games such as World of Warcraft or Angry Birds, however, have some unique features, such as the hiddenness of the rules. You discover them through experience with the game, which itself may alter as it progresses, in response to your own involvement. Players become part of the cybernetic feedback system, based on opaque algorithms. In this way and others, games themselves as well as gamified elements of ‘serious’ sites such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate also echo wider processes of capitalistic organizations.56 With the academic gamified sites, non-transparent scoring systems use mysterious metrics to give academics a supposed rank within a world of self-branding. Like any other ‘free’ platform, what is really free is the labour of the academic as she contributes to the profit of the platform.
Gamification occurs as enjoyable game-like features appear across different activities, and all depend on quantified scoring. Whitson comments on the kinds of self-surveillance entailed, giving personal examples from running devices, and others that she has analysed such as those for struggling with obesity or improving financial planning. They all work on the same premise, that minutely analysing data and giving feedback will increase both pleasure and performance for their users. Such systems measure and chart what previously was private. Inducements for desire are thus built in to the product and can easily become part of the surveillance imaginary. My own doctor has suggested – in vain, as yet! – that I consider obtaining a tracker to check my swimming, biking and running performance. He himself is an avid user.
Whitson concludes that this amounts to ‘quantifying the care of the self’.57 Users may constantly adjust their activity levels or behaviour depending on the incoming data, improving on their personal best in whatever field they ‘game’. It is not difficult to see in this case as well, however, how in certain areas, especially those associated with the workplace, such devices are also of interest to employers.58 The engrossing and pleasurable aspects of this may blur our vision of how this might also make us easier to manage, more administrable.59 Thus what we do as self-surveillance may also offer potential for others to surveill us as well.
Foursquare, which advertises itself as the ‘local search-and-discovery service mobile app which provides search results for its users’, is a somewhat different entity, says Whitson: ‘gamified networking’. Using maps for locating others, it enables social activities that move through space, finding friends in bars, clubs or coffee shops. Participants have to check in and become involved in tagging others to make the gaming aspects work. And, of course, if those participants are less than willing, the game aspects become moot.
This is where gaming and especially gamification become fuzzy. As noted a moment ago, employers are not slow to see the advantages to the organization of using quantified feedback to improve real-time productivity. Some will encourage the use of games, including Angry Birds, in the workplace as a way of motivating workers;60 others may adopt certain gamified self-surveillance as a part of their management strategy. But when is a game not a game? Probably when the employer requires you to ‘play’. Few workers will fail to recognize when the game is not offered as fun so much as to increase their efficiency and thus company profitability. Function creep, as desire is appropriated for different ends, is always a possibility.
But even when the game has no connection with employers, suggests Whitson, its ‘game’ qualities may be limited by its unique feature – the hidden rules. There is no way that players can see if the algorithms governing the game are fair and impartial, or if they are slanted in a specific way. Such games offer no spaces for negotiation or mutual agreement, and value judgements are always embedded within them, which may not favour all players equally.
Another way of considering the issues of games and surveillance is to see how important game metaphors have become within the surveillance scene. Multiple players with varied motives engage in surveillance, and power and discipline do not seem to be its key characteristics. Hille Koskela and Liisa Mäkinen discuss the metaphors of cat and mouse, hide and seek, labyrinth, sleight of hand and poker where enjoyment and control merge in surveillance today.61
For these authors surveillance-as-game, as play, offers the chance to challenge some standard surveillance definitions and thus re-evaluate some theories and highlight civil liberties concerns and perhaps unexpected forms of resistance. As an example of cat and mouse, they cite Internet Eyes, a British site for registered viewers to watch camera feed from stores and other businesses and to alert the camera owner of possible thefts. They comment, ‘As our lives become saturated with surveillance, new forms of social action will take place. We will have to recognize new forms of resistance and new moralities yet unknown.’62
Surveillance saturation, especially seen through the surveillance culture lens, definitely does call for new modes of alertness within emerging imaginaries, along with, one hopes, new modes of action in everyday practice. The challenge of the gamifying aspects of commercial surveillance is placed in a somewhat more sombre light by Julie Cohen. She argues that they mobilize ‘participation in our own construction as cultural subjects according to a very specific behavioral model’.63 By this she means that technologies of the self turn into quantified, monitored, feedback-driven ‘trajectories of self-improvement’. The story of the self thus constructed is one which network users cannot themselves shape.64 So the apparently pleasurable dimensions of such games both encourage their migration from one context to another – function creep – and potentially come at a high cost to the user.
For Cohen, then, the playfulness of these kinds of surveillance is a smokescreen. The algorithms that remain hidden from the user actually ‘constrain and channel evolving subjectivity, guiding individual action along more predictable lines’.65 Gone indeed are the sterner rationales for surveillance, to be replaced by light, even laughing, themes of play in the new narrative arc. But the ‘gamer-self’ now discovers new, socially reinforced notions of virtue. Maintain your high scores, outdo your personal best. In this case, they originate in online commercial platforms. They may be genuine fun but at a deeper level that fun is framed by others.
In this view, the participatory turn is a typically neoliberal stratagem that echoes entrepreneurial freedoms. The idea that games players are autonomous and consenting wears somewhat thin when the likeness of the system to other neoliberal distributions of privilege and entitlement is brought into the light.
If desire appears, through gaming, as a basic element of surveillance imaginaries, contributing to the creation of the self as a subject of carefully camouflaged criteria for forming identities, does this mean that gamers are just dupes of the system? Do gaming and related activities reduce down to loving Big Brother? This may seem bewildering for those who catch the reference to Winston Smith’s confession at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, understood as the final chilling capitulation of self to the surveilling state.
For John McGrath, surveillance proliferates in part because we desire it – enjoy it, play with it, use it for comfort – and through ‘repeated viewing we reposition ourselves, our psyches, in relation to … surveillance space’.66 And unlike Orwell – or Julie Cohen for that matter – McGrath does not think that we concede defeat or lose our selves when we admit to loving Big Brother. The games about which he writes have more to do with TV than the internet, as his investigation is, among other things, of the famous Big Brother shows that did most to launch the reality TV genre.
What does McGrath mean by ‘loving Big Brother’? Importantly, he sees the subjects of surveillance engaging in experiences not intended by the surveillors. He speaks of a ‘repositioning’ towards surveillance, perhaps like Koskela and Mäkinen’s ‘new forms of resistance’. In performance within surveillance spaces, he promotes the possibility that the desires of the powerful will be turned back and that an active social self will emerge, unafraid of surveillance and able to live creatively with it. The difficulty here, suggests Keith Tester,67 is that McGrath ignores the fact that the Big Brother lovers depend heavily on capital, both cultural and economic. The performers depend on their theatrical experience and also need the means to perform, however subversively.
McGrath discusses the Big Brother TV series, but these characters, too, know that they have nothing to lose in terms of subsistence. After all, their daily needs will be met. They do not know scarcity, poverty or put-downs as those who live in the wider world of surveillance certainly do. As Tester notes, ‘For the marginalized groups of contemporary capitalism, surveillance is not so accommodating or supportive.’ Beyond this, it is worth recalling that it is not just any capitalist social relations that are at play here, but a particular kind of relations, what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.
Readers of Orwell, used to contesting privacy invasion and lost liberties, may scratch their heads when they realize how data-careless some social media users seem. Why would you comply so readily, so unthinkingly, with this system that seems geared to sucking up personal details as a basic feature of its operation? Up pops the privacy paradox again. Orwell readers might well think that social media users seem seldom to worry about this, whereas, as danah boyd puts it, ‘it’s complicated’.68
The Department of Homeland Security rather coyly – and condescendingly – refers to the ‘narcissistic tendencies’ of social media acolytes.69 Perhaps its agents were required to read Christopher Lasch, whose critique of The Culture of Narcissism long pre-dated the advent of social media but who, according to some, foresaw the expanded self-absorption of new media culture.70 Lasch’s indictment of American culture, now over thirty years old, struck out at this pathology in which people’s grandiose ideas about themselves lead them to use others for their gratification even while craving their love and approval. Lasch worried about the deformation of character in a bureaucratic world that put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations and discouraged the formation of deep personal attachments. Does DHS hear echoes of this today?
Whatever the case, the DHS reference to broader cultural tendencies is a useful antidote to the kinds of hype that assume that what we see in the world of social media is merely the exploitation of technical potential. Mark Zuckerberg is a product of the culture excoriated by Lasch, and analysed sociologically by figures such as Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. Homeland Security capitalizes on those supposed narcissistic tendencies in order to glean information on potential threats to safety. But the capacity to garner such data from social media depends on the same technology infrastructure as the social media sites themselves. They are simply different dimensions of the same liquid modern culture.
One useful way of thinking about the connection between DHS surveillance and ‘narcissism’ is captured by the concept of exposure. As Kirstie Ball suggests,71 surveillance exposes people in various ways, but in the world of social media the inner life, or ‘interiority’, is exposed in ways that involve the activity of subjects. And as well as possibly resigning themselves to such exposure, it is possible that they enjoy it as well. The concept of exposure offers analysts the chance to think about the contents of the interior that are exposed, how they come to the surface, and how they may be examined by others.
Ball develops the concept of ‘exposure’ to draw attention to the ways in which a combination of media cultures and psychotherapy imperatives may encourage subjects to believe that they ought to divulge things about themselves. She suggests that surveillance may not only be tolerated but even sought after because ‘the giving of data satisfies individual anxieties, or may represent patriotic or participative values to the individual’. People may also be ‘ambivalent towards surveillance because there is sometimes no identifiable “watcher” or perceivable “control” being asserted, or because the pleasures of performative display override the scrutinies that come hand-in-hand with self-revelation’.72 Ball’s pioneering work may be seen alongside others’.
Of course, the context of consumer ‘soft surveillance’ may itself encourage exposure. Soft surveillance, as described by Gary Marx, is less intrusive and giving body data may be less controversial where particular forms of language are used and where there exists a particular media and cultural climate. This gets compliance by persuasion, yet denies meaningful choices, emphasizes community, not individual interests, and scans at a distance rather than crossing intimate body boundaries. It may also be associated with a cultural tendency to desire exposure for the gratification it affords. In such a context, personal exposure and the capture of increasingly private aspects of the self may be accepted as ‘desirable, normal and harmless’.73
Frank Furedi argues that a rise in ‘therapy culture’ normalizes public displays of vulnerability.74 For him, the climate creating the erosion of boundaries between public and private has everything to do with therapeutic confession. Public sharing of private troubles was already well developed on television – think Oprah Winfrey – long before social media simplified, expanded and globalized it. If emotions and feelings become the core of personal identity, then, says Furedi, bringing them to the surface and sharing them is seen not only as personally healing but as socially responsible. Once out, they can be managed. One sees this in support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as well.
Sharing may make a person feel good, even if it places them in a position of recovery rather than a return to health. Thus sharers are taught their place in society, suggests Furedi. Perhaps it is no accident that a stronghold of this kind of therapy is in California, in the work of figures such as the family therapist and psychologist Paul Watzlawick at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. Encouraging intimate sharing becomes part of the imperative of communication and may be seen as defining what it is to care. Chapter 5 comments on this in relation to a compelling fictional account that connects sharing and caring, surveillantly.
Connected with this, others are impatient with what they see as a myopic view of social media. They will assert that it is contemporary economic arrangements that encourage sharing of information in general, not just private problems. Jodi Dean argues that the need to be informed in the climate of endless amounts of information ‘catapults the repeated exposure and disclosure of secrets into the public domain’.75 So, in this case, the apparent willingness to be exposed may have to do with the ways in which today’s technoculture valorizes the production of better, faster, cheaper information, where the onus is increasingly on ‘going public’. The corollary of this is that otherwise there may be things you want to hide. According to Dean, contemporary communicative capitalism and state arrangements together produce the conditions promoting revelation and self-disclosure.76 The compulsion to disclose meets the drive to surveill, reinforcing the politics of the personal – or at least of personal data.
But yet another possible explanation of why social media users feel so free to allow their personal details to circulate freely online is that it represents a logical outgrowth of what Arlie Hochschild calls the ‘outsourced self’. Hochschild talks of twentieth-century America as a place where massive dislocations and disturbances occurred and where families, once dependent on local communities for support, now had to fend for themselves. With women and men in the labour force in almost equal numbers and an increasing incidence of divorce, a gap yawned between family and market provision of care. With no prospect of European-style government support, Americans turned to the market for making clothes, cooking and, of course, for growing produce in the first place. Old services became democratized and more specialized, but they also reached ‘into the heart of our emotional lives, a realm previously more shielded from the market’.77 Not only nannies and babysitters but also marriage counselling and ‘love coaching’ are services for sale.
When the self is outsourced in these ways, the market steps in, making incursions into many aspects of intimate life. If social life is already structured around such services, then the appearance of apps and sites where such services are also offered makes sense. In general, if there are already existing contexts in which highly personal details are readily shared, in a market context this could be seen as preparing the ground for internet versions of the same kinds of services. Willingness to part with personal data becomes routine in such settings. Why not?
Needless to say, online marketers may also benefit from these newly available kinds of data. The world of the emotions and of familial and romantic relations has long been a rich source of revenue and to tap into it remotely would have seemed an obvious next step. Mark Andrejevic calls this ‘affective economics’, which emphasizes the role of the emotional commitments of consumers when they make purchasing decisions.78 The aim is to code and analyse emotion to control modes of sociality and thus to turn ‘affect’ into a basic resource for exploitation within a very ‘soft’ version of surveillance capitalism.
Of course, this too could be taken even further in ways that distance even the user’s emotional content from the process of online participation. A curious story caught my eye, of an ‘autonomous self agent’ that can be hired to manage your social media without the tedium of constant checking, monitoring, liking and posting.79 The bot will do it for you for a small fee. Presumably, if the affect algorithms are correctly calibrated, the system will be able to second-guess your emotional state not only for making specific purchases, but also for lining up appropriate relationships. How handy.
We have heard many voices in this chapter, many views of what goes on in the world of social media and gaming cultures. From the DHS assuming that narcissism explains things, to scholars speaking of desire, scopophilia and, more straightforwardly, ‘loving Big Brother’. Each makes sense, in a way, but few actually refer to how users themselves think about their online activities. Yet those users have developed diverse and sometimes complex surveillance imaginaries and operate with online practices that make sense to them but do not necessarily fit the categories provided by commentators.
This is partly because the world of internet involvement is often thought of as a way of finding information or, more likely, a way of communicating, or networking, with others. Parting with personal data in the world of online activity is not necessarily thought of as a result of surveillance, for which privacy protections are needed. Thus if researchers start by asking social media users about their experiences of surveillance or their concerns for privacy, they are unlikely to get very far.
When social media users are interviewed or speak in focus groups about their online experiences, without the prompts of surveillance-and-privacy language, the results are diverse and complex. However, it becomes quite clear that, so far from not caring about what happens to their personal data, they are often very sensitive about such matters and consider some marketing and corporate activities highly inappropriate and simply unfair. That is not to say that all agree, by any means. Indeed, the context makes a difference to how institutional uses of personal data are construed, as does one’s social position, in terms of gender or age, and how much time is invested in online activities.
One fruitful way of considering this is what Helen Nissenbaum calls ‘contextual integrity’. She says that in an age when personal data flow freely through various channels and when all sorts of uses are made of them, it is important to know what really matters to those to whom the data refer. Many social media users, for instance, are much more concerned about what their online contacts can see of their posts and pages than about what corporations can see.80 Of course, this may be a sign of lack of awareness rather than lack of concern, but it could well be the case that different standards would still be applied to the different contexts.
Nissenbaum proposes four classes of context: the flow of information, the capacities in which the users are acting, the types of information in question, and the principle of transmission.81 The last case includes variations such as receiving information because a LinkedIn contact sent it, or Amazon chose to suggest a purchase, or a doctor’s office was obliged to inform the patient, or the recipient had agreed to keep a secret. For her, these contexts help to show why some kinds of data are seen as more revealing or controversial than others, and why some data collection methods provoke ire at least within certain groups of people. Indeed, Nissenbaum goes on to argue that disclosing certain kinds of details amounts to a denial of data rights if it is contrary to the expectations of the data subject.82
When users in England, Norway and Spain were asked by Helen Kennedy and associates to discuss their responses to online data-mining practices, many took a dim view of information shared with third parties, such as when an internet company like Facebook sells data to another company.83 A large proportion (81 per cent) disapproved of sharing information without their consent, and a similar percentage objected to companies monitoring social media to find out what employees were saying about that company. Some felt that there is a trade-off between connectivity and tracking and some were under the impression that, when they set their privacy setting on high, social media platforms would not share their data with other organizations.
‘Fairness’ is the word that appeared most frequently in these discussions about personal data mining on social media. A user might expect to divulge some personal details when, say, setting up an account, but would not assume that the company would then sniff out other intimate details for unadvertised uses. Users often noted that they wished for their consent to be meaningful, to be told in simple transparent terms what they were signing up for. Overall, this study suggests that while users may not pepper their parlance with ‘privacy’, they are concerned about ‘whether social media platforms operate within users’ normative expectations of what is ethical and just’.84
What can be learned from the fact that surveillance and privacy do not hold the same power as they might once have done for discussing issues of the handling of personal data, especially in the social media world? Does this hint that we now have to go beyond these concepts and argue that the onlife world is a post-surveillance or a post-privacy situation? Two things are worth saying here. The first is that if we are to understand appropriately the culture of surveillance, this may well mean accepting that surveillance may not be the top-of-mind word that users draw on to describe what is happening, any more than privacy is the first word they use to complain or claim some right.
In tension with the first, the second comment is that the language of surveillance and, yes, privacy has to be retained because these terms still point to the broader realities of what is happening in the world of social media and indeed of personal data generally. Power relations are inevitably involved, whether in corporate or government contexts. If our concern is not only to comprehend but also to be critical of today’s surveillance culture, then that concept is still crucial. This does not for a moment require denial that social media and gaming aficionados have fun, that their desires are expressed in being drawn to sharing and playing. But it does mean that such emotions and engagements must be viewed in context.
Enough has been said by now for the nature of that context to be fairly clear. Technically, it is the broad context of digital modernity with its distinctive, rapidly developing departure – surveillance capitalism. But as I say, this is merely a technical way of describing it. Others are available, notably the one that enlivens the next chapter. Although the chapter title refers rather abstractly to ‘total transparency’, its guiding topic is a novel, now a movie, The Circle. This piece of popular culture explores through near-time sci-fi a Silicon Valley corporation that epitomizes aspects of surveillance capitalism. Switching to a literary offering is a good way to complement the social science approach that we have engaged thus far. But it also offers the chance to stand back and appraise the situation in a more critical fashion – is it utopia or dystopia?