Media Convergence and Surveillance Lecture Notes PDF

Media Convergence and Surveillance  Cyberspace, Freedom and Surveillance ▪ “Much of the conversation about electronic mail, bulletin boards, and the information superhighway in general is steeped in a language of liberation and utopian possibility. It is easy to see why. I write...

Media Convergence and Surveillance  Cyberspace, Freedom and Surveillance ▪ “Much of the conversation about electronic mail, bulletin boards, and the information superhighway in general is steeped in a language of liberation and utopian possibility. It is easy to see why. I write these words in 1995. To date, a user’s experience of the Internet is of a dizzyingly free zone. On it, information is easily accessible. One can say anything to anyone”. – Sherry Turkle: Life on the Screen. Cyberspace, Freedom and Surveillance ▪ “Despite many people’s good intentions, there is much in recent social thought that casts a sobering light on such enthusiasms. Michel Foucault’s work, for example, elaborates a perspective on information, communication and power that undermines any easy links between electronic communication and freedom”. – Sherry Turkle  Discipline and Punish ▪ Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison) ▪ Foucault argues in this book that the eighteen century saw the emergence of new mechanisms of power: surveillance, regimentation, categorization and punishment. ▪ This new system of power became materialized, for Foucault, in a device called Panopticon. ▪ Proposed by the social philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon enabled a prison guard to see all prisoners without being seen. At any given time, any prisoner was perhaps being observed, perhaps not.  Surveillance and Punishment ▪ Prisoners would have to assume they were being observed and would therefore behave according to the norms imposed by the guard. ▪ These prisoners will eventually learn to look at themselves through the eyes of the prison guard, thus internalizing the surveillance. ▪ Foucault argues that the technologies of power associated with the Panopticon and the prison have extended to other social institutions such as education and psychiatry. Rise of the Panoptic/Surveillance Society ▪ The crowd is replaced by a controlled and enumerable multiplicity. ▪ Power should be visible and unverifiable. ▪ There is a social machinery that guarantees asymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. ▪ The Panopticon is a privileged space to enable the experimentation upon persons. ▪ Minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen.  Rise of the Panoptic/Surveillance Society ▪ As modernity has advanced, the techniques of surveillance, categorizing and punishment have extended more and more into civil society. ▪ The success of this disciplinary power is based in three simple instruments: the hierarchical inspection, the normalizing sanction and its combination, the examination. ▪ Rather than the massive, binary division between the ones and the others, appeals for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, a depth organization of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power. Rise of the Panoptic/Surveillance Society ▪ An architecture that is no longer simply meant to be seen or to keep watch of external space, but that allows an internal control, articulated and detailed (make visible those who are inside). ▪ The building itself must be a device that encourages surveillance. ▪ Progressive objectification and increasingly finer grid of individual behaviors. ▪ Disciplinary institutions have created a machinery of control that functions as a microscope of individual actions. HIERARCHICAL OBSERVATION “The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. Minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen.” – Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish  HIERARCHICAL OBSERVATION “By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an 'integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network 'holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised”  “At the same time, by way of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations. It was a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus: so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject find himself caught in a punishable, NORMALIZING JUDGEMENT punishing universality” “What is specific to the disciplinary penality is non- observance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it. The whole indefinite domain of the non-conforming is punishable. The order that the disciplinary punishments must enforce is of a mixed nature: it is an 'artificial’ order, explicitly laid down by a law, a programme, a set of regulations. But it is also an order defined by natural and observable processes.” NORMALIZING JUDGEMENT  NORMALIZING JUDGEMENT “In discipline, punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment. And it is this system that operates in the process of training and correction This mechanism with two elements makes possible a number of operations characteristic of disciplinary penality. First, the definition of behaviour and performance on the basis of the two opposed values of good and evil; instead of the simple division of the prohibition, as practised in penal iustice, we have a distribution between a positive pole and a negative pole; all behaviour falls in the field between good and bad marks, good and bad points. The disciplinary apparatuses hierarchized the 'good’ and the 'bad’ subjects in relation to one another.”  THE EXAMINATION “The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.”  THE EXAMINATION I. The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power.  Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. II. The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation.  The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them. 3. The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a ‘case’.  A case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power. The case is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.  Rise of the Panoptic/Surveillance Society ▪ Today, all citizens are both guards and guarded. ▪ As the disciplinary power extends its influence, its surveillance capabilities increase and become more complex.  A Digital Panopticon ▪ “But Andy and Daniella, two other MIT freshmen, express reservations about computer mediated communication. […] ▪ “Andy Hangs our on a MUD on which wizards have the power to enter any room without being seen. This means that they can “overhear” private conversations. He is organizing a petition to stop this practice. […] ▪ “His comment provokes the following remark from Daniella: ‘Do you know that if you type the finger command, you can see the last time someone got online? So you are responsible for your e-mail if you log on to your computer, because everybody can know that you got your messages”. – Sherry Turkle: Life on the Screen.  Surveillance in the Age of Convergence ▪ Today surveillance has become a normal part of our lives, people are not only constantly under surveillance but actually enjoy being watched and watching others.  Surveillance in the Age of Convergence ▪ “We are not safe from electronic surveillance if we log on to the Internet, watch cable TV, use the telephone, or use GPS; someone, something, somewhere has access to a record of that transaction” ” – Martin Hirst, John Harrison and Patricia Mazepa. ▪ Electronic fingerprints. ▪ Malware: ▪ Computer software programs that hack into a computer system and disrupt normal operations and/or gather information.  Big Brother ▪ Historically, one important way in which the state has identified who is a threat to their normal operations is through surveillance. ▪ Government surveillance is made through intelligence-sharing among different countries and different agencies within particular countries. ▪ Governments and agencies share information on “suspected persons and activities”. ▪ The result of this sharing is an enormous convergence of data. ▪ USA PATRIOT (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act. ▪ This act significantly increased the powers of surveillance of the American government. ▪ After 9/11 Canada also created a similar initiative: the Anti- terrorism Act.  Lawful Access ▪ Interception of communications and seizure of information, including computer data that is considered by the government as lawful. ▪ Cyber Command ▪ Was created first in the US when antiterrorists experts added the illicit use of the Internet to their list of weapons of mass destruction. ▪ Is managed by the US and Canadian military. ▪ The Department of Homeland Security is recruiting high- school students to be its “web warriors”.  Control of Information ▪ Some governments are using digital surveillance technologies to retain control over political power. ▪ Chinese journalist Shi Tao, for example, made some comments about Taiwan deemed as subversive by the Chinese government. He was arrested because Yahoo! Gave details from his email account to the authorities. ▪ Many other countries are passing new laws that will give the governments more control regarding the Internet.  Surveillance Economy ▪ “A convergence of interests seems to be developing among players such as copyright owners and service providers on the one hand, and the State´s growing interest in the digital environment, on the other hand. Law enforcement agencies seek to enhance their monitoring capacity and online businesses seek to prevent fraud and combat piracy while strengthening their ties with authorities”. – Michael Birnhack and Niva Elkin-Thoren  Surveillance Economy ▪ “As the Panopticon and Internet ad servers demonstrate, surveillance as a technique and technology of control is a central dimension of the capitalist state, particularly under the social formation identified as “late capitalism” or “information capitalism” (Kling & Allen, 1996). Indeed, few institutions are better exemplars of surveillance than the capitalistic workplace […]. Not only has capitalism utilized new information technologies to expand surveillance in the workplace (eg, monitoring of e-mails and phone calls, genetic screening, and closed-circuit video cameras), but increasingly the same technologies are also used to watch, record, and assess routine activities in the marketplace” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Surveillance Economy ▪ In a surveillance economy, surveillance is employed to shape and manage consumption. ▪ Commercial Surveillance: ▪ Companies want to obtain valuable information about individuals and their shopping habits. ▪ Media-based and market-based surveillance of the habits of the people such as eating, shopping, spending, banking, entertainment.  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “We hold that self-surveillance exists in cyberspace in that individuals cooperate in the online gathering of data about themselves as economic subjects. One possible explanation for this self-surveillance is an epistemological shift we identify as the commodification of privacy. In line with Davies (1997), we will suggest that the participation in surveillance is partially achieved through the reconceptualization of privacy in the consumer's mind from a right or civil liberty to a commodity that can be exchanged for perceived benefits.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy: Digital Enclaves ▪ There are a number of reasons that have pushed people toward greater privatization of their online experience: ▪ The strengthening of friendship-based networks encouraged by participatory culture. ▪ The supposed danger posed by strangers online. ▪ An atmosphere of moral panic that discourages people from interacting with people outside their personal social networks.  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “However, it is less clear how individuals are persuaded online to provide personal information that does not have immediate financial relevance -information regarding gender, sexuality, race, age, education, or household income. Essentially, the question becomes one of why individuals would provide any more information to corporations than is absolutely necessary to complete some commercial transaction (e.g., credit card and shipping information).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “Clearly, the exchange of information between consumers and suppliers is not equitable, as large corporations do not in the same transaction generally reveal to consumers detailed information regarding their internal structure or operations. Additionally, corporations rarely indicate to consumers how their personal information will be used. For example, consider the ambiguity generally found in online privacy policies, which are often esoteric or overly vague (Turow & Nir, 2000).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “Gandy (1996) suggests that it is this very inequality in the relationship between consumers and suppliers of goods and services in the marketplace that compels individuals to provide personal information. The ability of the producer or supplier to set the terms of the contract that the consumer can only accept or decline defines the transaction as inherently inequitable. As Gandy notes, in the marketplace, the consumer is ultimately a “contract taker, rather than a contract maker,” and thus provides the information in the belief that it represents a reasonable transaction cost (p. 145).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “Though the inequitable power relationship between consumers and suppliers constitutes the context of online surveillance, the mechanisms by which marketers frame participatory surveillance as a reasonable transaction cost are sufficiently subtle as not to be evident to consumers. In other words, individuals are not necessarily aware of the degree of inequalities in their relationship with suppliers because marketers and advertisers have effectively concealed the consumerist Panopticon.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “In this consumerist Panopticon, we provide personal information about ourselves in the belief that we will ultimately benefit from such disclosure through convenient access to goods and or services. Of course, this consumerist model is predicated on the implicit understanding that if we do not engage in self-disclosure –if we do not willingly offer our private lives to the gaze of marketers- we will be punished by exclusion from the rewards of the marketplace.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “In essence, marketers employ a very subtle threat of coercion by cultivating in the consumer the sense of “losing out” if they do not willingly submit to panoptic surveillance. Again, we are impelled through enticement. This submission of the consumer is facilitated by rhetorical devices in the advertising-shaped media that foster an understanding of privacy as little more than a means of barter.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “For Davies, privacy has been effectively reconceptualized in the popular imagination as a commodity of ever declining value, which serves the interests of the capitalist enterprise. Davies contends this has been achieved in part by a discursive shift in the public sphere from the protection of privacy per se to the protection of personal data.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “This shift has been accompanied by an “illusion of voluntariness” (p. 143), an illusion carefully constructed by marketers to conceal the imposition of corporate surveillance. This is a critical aspect of the online Panopticon, for, as Davies notes, ”many surveillance schemes now involve a ‘voluntary’ component that has the effect of neutralizing public concern” (p. 144). These shifts have effectively rendered privacy into a commodity: ”Traditional rights have been put on a commercial footing, thus converting privacy rights into consumer issues”” (p. 144). Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy ▪ “Of course, this "partnership" between the consumer and the corporation is a carefully constructed illusion. Even when the means of surveillance are visible and superficially consensual (i.e., the individual agrees to provide personal information or to be "tracked" online), the underlying processes to which the data are put remain concealed. Individuals are never made a party to how they are being categorized and assessed, and thus, participate without understanding precisely what it is they participate in. In essence, there is, as Lyons (2001) notes, participation without "informed consent.“” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  The Commodification of Privacy. ▪ “If, as Staples (2000) argues, the Panopticon has been "fully integrated into the new consumptive model" (p. 87), the question becomes how has this been achieved? Staples suggests that the "seduction and pleasure of consuming are made possible only with the obsessive 'data mining' of our personal lives" (p. 87).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Data-Mining ▪ Data-Mining refers to “The technical, digital means of gathering, sorting, classifying, and building a profile from available data now exist to elevate surveillance abilities ‘to the level of the science fiction sublime’” – Martin Hirst, John Harrison and Patricia Mazepa. ▪ Data-mining is at the center of the security- industrial complex. ▪ Privacy has become a means of exchange. ▪ People voluntarily surrender their information to corporations, for example, when they register to Facebook or to Apple Store.  Data-Mining ▪ Cookies ▪ Monitor, measure and store information that can be used for data analysis or sold to corporations. ▪ Cookies are used to track the activities of particular individuals. ▪ Data collection is used to sort people into categories that become commodified as target markets. ▪ Individual consumer data profiles or PII (Personally Identifiable Information). ▪ The PII is used to trace an individual’s identity on the cyberspace. It becomes more detailed as more information is obtained and stored.  Data-Mining ▪ To interpret all this data, a new industry has been developed. ▪ Companies called “data-brokers” collect, compare and merge information from many databases. They package this information according to requests made by their different types of clients. ▪ The data-mining industry is becoming an oligopoly. Only a limited number of huge transnational corporations dominate the international market. ▪ Google. ▪ Not part of the data-mining industry. However, its enormous infrastructure allows this company to collect massive quantities of information. ▪ Everything people do on Google properties goes into Google databases.  Dataveillance ▪ “The systematic monitoring of people’s actions or communications through the application of information technology”. – Clarke ▪ There are two types of dataveillance: ▪ Personal dataveillance: Tracking the actions of an individual. ▪ Mass dataveillance: Tracking the actions of groups of the population. ▪ The data collected on people’s surfing habits on the net is used predict future behavioral patterns. ▪ These behavioral marketing has the objective of targeting consumers through the use of what is termed “customization”. ▪ Customization consists in offering customized advertisements and communications to Internet users based on the behavioral patterns of these same users as discovered through data-mining.  Panoptic Sort ▪ Individuals are sorted into specific categories based on the information that has been collected about them. ▪ “For Gandy (1 996), the "panoptic sort" is a complex social-technological process that is panoptic in that "it considers all information about individual status and behavior to be potentially useful in the production of intelligence about a person's economic value" (p. 133).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “The panoptic sort is, in essence, a discriminatory technology inherently linked with information technologies and intended to manipulate mass consumption in the marketplace. The broader social impact of this discriminatory technology is that it can both include and exclude individuals from various social-economic opportunities, such as employment, insurance, housing, education, and credit.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “The panoptic sort is predicated on the ability of information technologies to gather personal information (even if that information is not directly linked to an individual's offline identity), and transform that data into intelligence. The distinction between data and intelligence is significant: Where data alone is a raw resource, data that has been processed and evaluated is an asset to marketers in their efforts to predict and direct consumer behavior.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “Within the panoptic sort, data are used to perform three distinct, yet interrelated functions: identification, classification, and assessment. For Candy (1 996), identification refers to "the need for reliable evidence of the identities of individuals with whom one does business" (p. 135). This is especially important in advanced capitalistic societies where transactions are increasingly conducted through communication media, notably the telephone and the internet. Gandy notes, however, that the capture of identifying information -name, address, telephone number, social security number, mother's maiden name- is increasingly motivated by the corporate "desire to establish, or to enhance, a consumer record“ (p. 135).” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “Classification, in turn, is the process whereby personal information (i.e., raw data) is used to assign an individual to a group or "type" of consumer on the basis of "shared characteristics" (Gandy, p. 135). This classification process is thematically similar to Foucault's understanding of the disciplinary isolation and ranking of individuals within the Panopticon.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “"Classification and sorting are thought to increase the efficiency and effectiveness with which rewards and punishments can be applied in order to reduce uncertainty about the future behavior of disciplinary subjects" (p. 135). The interrelated processes of classification and assessment assign "a complex individual to a group on the basis of race, gender, or neighborhood" while ignoring "the myriad other facts that make up that person’s uniqueness in preference for the efficient predictability in this narrow classification"(p. 136). Critically, these social markers (e.g., race, gender, age) are used by suppliers of goods and services to appraise a person's "value as the target of a commercial appeal" (p. 137). Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “the result of any comprehensive profile of online activities is the same: the assessment and ranking of different groups of consumers. In essence, consumer profiles constructed from our social positionalities- that is, on the basis of race, gender, age, class, education, health, sexuality, and consumptive behavior- become our economic selves, reflecting our value within a commercial society.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “Thus effective classification equates with predictive utility; the more precisely a marketing firm can classify an individual as a potential consumer, the more effectively that firm can predict (and manipulate) an individual's consumptive behavior. Ultimately, predictive utility allows marketers to reduce the risk producers face in the marketplace.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Panoptic Sort ▪ “If the information collected is used to sort people into categories of data, what if your data is either considered so very important –to the extent that you end up on a no-fly list (or worse yet, imprisoned)- or there’s no place free of the advertising that is “tailor-made” for you? On the other hand, what happens if you are so very unimportant that you are marginalized, identified as unworthy or unnecessary, entrenching divisions in social class, gender, or race or ethnicity, and so on”. – Martin Hirst, John Harrison and Patricia Mazepa.  Biosurveillance ▪ “The novel regimes of surveillance can be considered to exemplify a form of “biosurveillance” that integrates aspects of public health surveillance with techniques employing the use of big data formerly reserved for the maintenance of state and national security (Lee 2019). Prior to the advent of COVID-19, concerns had been raised around the lack of transparency regarding how big data algorithms were developed and applied and how biases built into these algorithms can exacerbate racial and socioeconomic inequalities and vulnerabilities (Hacker and Petkova 2017; Gianfrancesco et al. 2018)…  Biosurveillance ▪ …The nature and extent of the power exercised through big data analytics, the identity of those on whose behalf such power was exercised, and to whom—if anyone—they were accountable has been the subject of scrutiny (Couldry and Powell 2014); these concerns are even more relevant now with the introduction of multiple new forms of surveillance.” Danielle L. Couch, Priscilla Robinson & Paul A. Komesaroff  Conclusions ▪ “Lyons (1994) contends that "to participate in modern society is to be under electronic surveillance" (p. 4). This, in turn, raises the question of whether we can decide simply not to participate? Unfortunately, our decision to participate is made in an environment that is shaped by inequalities of power.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Conclusions ▪ “This raises the question, however, of who has the advantage. Who is it that wields such disproportionate power in the marketplace? Within the capitalist state, the answer is evident: the corporation. It is the corporation that appears to dictate the conditions of the marketplace, and, correspondingly, constructs and maintains our participatory Panopticon. Equally, it is to the corporation that we must sell ourselves all should we want to reap the fruits of a technologically advanced and mediated society.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Conclusions ▪ “However, we do not believe such resistance will be found within the online Panopticon. Because the agent of surveillance is not as apparent in cyberspace neither the guard nor the central tower can be seen even though they can be assumed to be omnipresent –it is less clear whom to resist. Of course, the most important factor disarming popular resistance is our very participation in surveillance. After all, we are not being physically coerced into availing ourselves to the panoptic gaze of the marketer. It is a price we appear willing to pay for all of the benefits advertisers and marketers have to offer.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  Conclusions ▪ “In the end, this perceived participatory element –this problematic notion that we benefit from rendering ourselves objects of inspection- makes the online Panopticon all the more insidious. We may have feared the intrusion of Big Brother into our homes and private lives, but we open wide the door to his corporate cousins even as they reduce us to economic abstracts and marketing segments.” Campbell and Carlson: Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy  A Tool of Freedom, a Tool of Oppression ▪ “There’s these two polarizing perspectives: everything is great: the Internet has created all this freedom and liberty and everything’s fantastic. The second insists that everything is terrible. The Internet has created all these tools for cracking down and spying and controlling what we say. Both are true. The Internet has done both.” Aaron Swartz