Living in Media: Surveillance and Privacy in the Digital Age PDF

A life in media is, to a certain extent, a public life. It used to be difficult to get attention for your life ---unless you were a prominent politician, a popular athlete, or some kind of celebrity from the music or film world. In our digital environment, it is difficult to keep something really pr...

A life in media is, to a certain extent, a public life. It used to be difficult to get attention for your life ---unless you were a prominent politician, a popular athlete, or some kind of celebrity from the music or film world. In our digital environment, it is difficult to keep something really private. Surveillance in such a society, where the lines between private and public life are less than clear, has a simultaneous panoptic, synoptic, and omnoptic character:  - In a **panoptic** context, a small group---usually the state and a few large corporations---keeps an eye on the rest of the population to gather information, manage, and possibly influence or even control people. This kind of top-down or **vertical surveillance** can be obviated by **anti-surveillance**, intended to either avoid monitoring altogether (e.g., internet browsers tend to include options to block companies from tracking you online) or make observation more difficult to achieve. Several companies, for instance, offer sunglasses that stay dark when scanned by facial recognition software (which otherwise would make them transparent); artists around the world create modified jewelry, unique hairstyles, specialized clothing items, and even entire fashion lines that aim to confuse or defeat cameras, trackers, and scanners to raise awareness and critique widespread surveillance.  - **Synoptic** surveillance occurs when the roles are reversed, as people collaboratively monitor, evaluate, and rate the products and services of companies, municipalities, and state actors online. Examples include feedback platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot, and a dating review app called Lulu that asked female users to evaluate the romantic appeal of their male dates. (Lulu launched in 2013 and was sold to Badoo---one of the mostdownloaded dating apps in the world, originally launched in Moscow---in 2016 after much controversy.) Another prominent instance of synoptic surveillance (or **coveillance**) is people using their smartphone to record and share footage of police brutality. These kinds of **inverse surveillance** tactics have become part of the operating procedures of many grassroots organizations around the world, deliberately recording their experiences of being watched and using this to analyze and question surveillance practices. - With **omnoptic** surveillance, everyone keeps an eye on everyone else in a digital culture in which more and more devices are always on, and people can be permanently accessible, which makes every media user a potential target as well as a source of observation and inspection. With this kind of horizontal surveillance---sometimes referred to as **sousveillance**---you, your friends, fellow students or coworkers, family members, and anyone else potentially participate in all kinds of observation and monitoring practices in media. Women in particular experience the dark side of omnoptic surveillance quite regularly, as men (often already at a very young age) stalk them, send or solicit sexual images, bully, and otherwise harass females online (mainly via social media). It could be argued that a fourth type of surveillance can be added to this list: that of **self-surveillance**, referring to the attention one pays to one's behavior when facing the actuality or virtuality of immediate or mediated monitoring. Self-surveillance in media has many forms, including checking up on and maintaining one's profiles across several online social networks, quantifying and tracking all kinds of health-related data (e.g., using step counters, smartphone applications to log food calories, and wearable devices such as a Fitbit to document daily activities), and dutifully recording and sharing various aspects of one's everyday life (also known as "lifelogging" or "lifestreaming" when using a camera to broadcast one's life in real time). Surveillance, as almost everyone experiences it, takes place in at least seven basic ways, as enacted by - the state and security forces,  - health care agencies (including hospitals and insurance companies),  - industries and businesses,  - social institutions (including the workplace, school, and family),  - everyone,  - you (tracking yourself),  - and machines. When we worry about surveillance, it usually has to do with a top-down, vertical, or **panoptic** (literally, "all-seeing") form of surveillance. The core of a panoptic surveillance system is not so much that everyone is under surveillance but that people feel that they can be monitored at all times and adapt their behavior accordingly. Control of people in a surveillance society is not carried out by an all-powerful state or some other authority but is embodied and enacted by people themselves in response to omnipresent cameras, scanners, sensors and trackers. Consider our lives in media as constituting a participatory Panopticon, given so many people's apparent comfort with sharing (details of) their lives online. In the context of our lives as lived in media, two key critical debates about surveillance to engage in some detail involve the role and consequences of *surveillance capitalism* and *technology bias*. First, we can consider the role of surveillance as providing the global digital economy with its main currency: our personal information.Second, the consequences of institutions basing some or all of their operations on the outcome of algorithmic procedures derived from digital data should be carefully examined.  Even if provided with "perfect" data, computers and algorithms still produce outcomes that disproportionately affect anyone who does not fit the "mainstream" or dominant profile as defined by machines.  The networks that people use to connect with each other can be monitored: telephone lines, internet cables, computer servers, satellite connections. This process, usually governed by laws and legal frameworks, can be done directly---where the state literally listens in on telephone conversations, reads our emails or chat messages, and records us in public spaces using omnipresent closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras---or indirectly, whereby representatives of a government request this type of data from a technology or telecommunications company (such as some of the corporations mentioned in the Snowden files, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Paltalk). All of this is contingent on such companies cooperating with the state. The state, security, and police tend to experience *data glut*. Confusion about what data is stored, who is responsible for which files, when data is considered to be obsolete (and on the basis of what criteria), how many copies of certain records exist (and where), how to prevent data hoarding, and poor data management protocols all contribute to an imperfect state of affairs. Part of these kinds of ethical issues is the question of to whom your data actually belongs. Many medical records cannot be viewed by patients themselves, or its archiving and management are the responsibility of technology companies that are not even located in your country of residence (as the provision of e-health hardware and software tends to be outsourced). Forms of Surveillance: Business and Industry  The patterns that statistical programs extract from data can therefore best be understood as the product of the operations and calculations that have been applied to them, more so than a somehow accurate reflection of the people the data were gathered from. Making sense of the complex mix of gigantic data files, algorithmic analysis, and small-scale ethnographic research furthermore requires *data empathy*. teleparenting Despite this lengthy list of examples of surveillance in the realm of civil society and social life, there are plenty more instances to be found across all social institutions (including religion, sports, and law). Taken together, there are a few trends common across all cases of institutional surveillance as it has developed over time and accelerated in our digital environment:  1. An ever-growing data hunger that is never satisfied as each subsequent generation of hardware and software demands additional information  2. A general lack of overview and consensus regarding responsibilities and control over all the different types of monitoring involved  3. A lack of transparency as to for whom and to what purpose all these data are obtained, how they get archived, and how all this information may be subsequently used Observing Each Other shadow profiling: using data collected about nonusers to create profiles of people who have never signed up for Facebook.  Increasingly, our experience of online social networks extends to all other aspects of the internet (such as shopping, finding news and information, and playing games), a process called the platformization of the World Wide Web.  What seems clear is that (without formal legislation and enforceable protections) the responsibility for surveillance in a synoptic context shifts from top to bottom on the basis of self-tracking---from the state to the citizen, from the company to the consumer, from the public sphere to the private circumstances of the individual. egodocuments We measure *passive data* by keeping track of where we are (via the GPS function on our mobile devices), what time it is, what our body temperature and heart rate is, logging our weight and counting calories of what we eat and drink, whether we stand or sit down, and so on. *Active data* include the number of steps you take per day, logging any kind of exercise, time spent on a variety of activities (including how much time we spend on our media devices), what we do when using media (e.g., saving the movies and television programs you watch, which games you play, the music you listen to, and everything you read in books, magazines, and newspapers), how many hours you sleep, how many words you type, how many kilometers you swim, cycle, or run, and so on. Third, a distinct trend is to register *affective data*, such as keeping files on daily routines, cravings and tendencies, personal goals and motivation, moods and feelings, your thoughts, ideas, and dreams While it is tempting to point to others, the state, or the commercial world when it comes to our worries about how "Big Brother is watching you," it is safe to say that "little brother" surveillance---the kind of mundane tracking and monitoring we do to ourselves and each other---is a prominent omnoptic feature of our everyday lives in media. Monitoring by Machines Finally, we have to consider a form of surveillance that affects everyone but remains invisible: *dataveillance*. In this process, machines record, store, exchange, process, and repurpose the data obtained from all the various forms of surveillance documented in this chapter and more.  Beyond strategic and tactical resistance, a perhaps more democratic approach involves critical reflection on how to live with surveillance in all its forms and guises---including an appreciation of why we all participate in the rise of a global surveillance society, where panopticism, synopticism, and omnopticism exist side by side. Public Life Technological advances can be deployed to encourage organizations and institutions to be more cooperative, productive, and creative rather than nontransparent, controlling, and disciplining, depending on what people actually want from technology and how we are going to take responsibility for our desires. Technological advances can be deployed to encourage organizations and institutions to be more cooperative, productive, and creative rather than nontransparent, controlling, and disciplining, depending on what people actually want from technology and how we are going to take responsibility for our desires.. Contrastingly, living in a world where everything and everyone is potentially visible in media reminds us that we are all interconnected, that we can use that link for things other than self-disciplining or self-promotion, and that we are not powerless, as the true power of omnipresent surveillance ultimately depends on our willing participation in it. Chapter 4 of Life in Media It is in these early intellectual skirmishes about humanity's relationship with technology that we can find debates that strike at the heart of contemporary concerns about the role of pervasive and ubiquitous media in society and everyday life:  - the growing interdependence\* of humanity and technology tends to be met with concern and uneasiness;  - peoples' hopes and fears about omnipresent media can be traced throughout (and are subsequently deeply shaped by) the history of human-machine relationships;  - discussions and anxieties about the relations between humanity and technology (including about what is real or virtual, true or fake) are about much more than our current news, information, and entertainment landscape, inviting a fundamental consideration of what it means to be human in a comprehensively mediated, algorithmic and to some extent automated context;  - and taking up a critical and ethical stance regarding media life is complex in a situation where the boundaries between humanity, nature, and technology seemingly blur beyond meaningful distinction interdependence -- (of two or more people or things) dependent on each other. **1. Following Samuel Butler's call, we can wage war against the machines.** This can be done quite literally by, for example, destroying or discarding media, dismantling hardware, uninstalling software, disconnecting from networks, deliberately opting against using certain devices (such as a smartphone), and through active nonparticipation in online social networks. A more indirect way of warfare includes developing a critical, if not suspicious, attitude toward media---for example, by advocating for rigorous media literacy programs and education. **2. We can also submit to a mediated existence**, recognizing the inevitable boundary-blurring characteristics of a life in media and trusting ourselves to technology without surrendering to machines. This, for instance, means that people develop more deliberate choices and cultivate some level of critical awareness about their media, while still enjoying the digital environment for what it has to offer. **3. A third option would be to become media, as it were**: becoming like the character Neo in The Matrix franchise (of motion pictures, animation series, comics, and digital games, beginning in 1999) by either accepting the reality with which we are presented or embracing a notion of reality as open source: malleable, subject to hacking and cocreation. Examples of such an approach would be designing alternative social media that are not built on the exploitation of people's personal information, investing in free and open-source software, and developing a not-for-profit digital commons. Perhaps we have already become media and that this rather uncanny sensation provides a fruitful way forward to study and understand our digital environment. **On the Imperfection of Communication** Undeterred by evidence to the contrary, both politicians, researchers, and the wider public have, since the early twentieth century, recurrently projected their fears onto media as a massive unidirectional influencing machine. This, for example, involved historical fears, such as - the technological threat from more advanced civilizations, as depicted in the War of the Worlds serialized stories of the English author H. G. Wells (published between April and December 1897); - scary predictions about robots rebelling and exterminating human life, as in the 1921 play Rossum's Universal Robots by the Czech writer Karel Čapek (which introduced the word robot into the English language, derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor," and which narrative, interestingly, ends with robots displacing humans from power, proclaiming, "Mankind is no more. Mankind gave us too little life. We wanted more life"); - the rallying potential of propaganda posters before and during the Second World War; - investigations and even court cases about popular music (including The Beatles in the 1960s, Led Zeppelin in the 1970s, Queen and Slayer in the 1980s, Motörhead in the 1990s---all among my favorite bands) "backmasking" their music to insert evil messages; - the widespread panic about violence in video games after the 1999 Columbine high school shooting in the United States; and - global distress about the supposed power of online social networks to target political advertisements to individual users and thereby sway elections (as claimed in 2017 by the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, using Facebook data to create customized propaganda for its clients) and about online platforms acting as amplifiers of disinformation and especially widespread conspiracy theories about COVID-19 (from March 2020 onward). In short, media are considered powerful because they are perceived as coming between us and who we really are, thereby corrupting the chance for real interaction, pure communication, and genuine understanding.  consider diasporic families with parents, children, and grandparents scattered around the world, trying to maintain kinship over distance, for whom (mobile) phones and internet connectivity are crucial technologies of love. Well before the global coronavirus crisis of 2020, warlike wrangles about the perceived dangers of (and proposed limits to) media have been common across all levels of society, such as - **widespread parental unease about screen time for children and teenagers**, especially since the introduction of game consoles (like the PlayStation, Xbox, GameBoy and Switch); - surveys among media users in general (and young people in particular) consistently finding that many feel their media use has become excessive, experiencing a lack or loss of control and finding it difficult to withdraw; - **researchers from a variety of fields (especially since the late 1990s) focusing on the question of problematic media use**, with "internet gaming disorder," for example, being added in 2013 to the fifth edition of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (a primary classification system for psychiatric disorders) and intense scholarly engagement on such issues as compulsive internet use, pornography addiction, and smartphone dependency; and - **political apprehension about the role and impact of disinformation campaigns, the extraordinary reach and perceived power of internet platforms (such as Facebook), and the lack of privacy protections for citizens online**, inspiring new laws around the world such as the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and 2022 Digital Services Act of the European Union, a newly amended Act on the Protection of Personal Information in Japan (2017), Chile amending its constitution to include data privacy as a human right in 2018, and numerous governments around the world introducing similar legislation concerning the protection of personal information in the 2020s (including Brazil, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and China). In the practice and discipline of media studies, a warring approach to omnipresent media in society and everyday life continues to inspire a vast area of research focused largely on - the (consequences of) concentration of media ownership and state (or corporate) control over the media, - hidden messages in the content of the media (generally assumed to promote a consensual, mainstream and distinctly commercial view of the world), and - the extent to which people understand (and act on) the media content they consume. On the one hand, technological applications offer all kinds of outcomes for people: a wig makes you look more youthful; glasses, binoculars, telescopes, and microscopes allow us to see better and further; electricity makes life easier; industrial production simplifies and speeds up the work process. On the other hand, people's dependence on all this technological ingenuity systematically advances---and with it our apprehension accumulates. It is in the inextricable correlation between opportunity and dependence that we may lose ourselves to machines, technology, and media, in the process discovering different ways of making sense of the interdependence that ensues. The developments in augmented and extended reality hardware and software development generally proceed without much political or public intervention, suggesting that the ongoing blending of the real and the virtual has become more mundane.  Rather than consider mediated communication a one-way, linear process leading from a select few people that make and send messages ---governments, media corporations, professional media makers, elites---to influence relatively indistinct masses and shape public opinion, media are seen as part of an entire *circuit of culture* indicative of the interdependent relations between people and media, featuring five interconnected elements: - production, or the process of making media (from conception to creation, marketing and distribution); - identity, or who the people, groups, and networks (and their norms and values) are involved in the various stages of making, distributing, regulating, and using media; - representations, or the form, format, and genre of a media product or message; - regulations, or the formal and informal rules and controls regarding media (including laws, policies, cultural norms, and expectations) and how these are enforced; and - consumption, or all the different ways in which people engage with media. **The Options We Have: We Become Media** Baudrillard comes to a similar conclusion in his take on the role of media in people's perception and experience of reality, suggesting that, ultimately, in a fully mediated existence any relation with an original place that would have existed before its rendering in media gets destroyed: "Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.... It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself." "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce." Yet it can be argued that, in many ways, you and I have already become media. This point can be pursued by following the definition of media (as outlined in chapter 2)---as the artifacts we use, the activities we undertake with media, and how all of this fits into the daily routines of our lives---regarding how all of us become media. **Becoming media: as artifacts  ** Human bodies and environments are increasingly integrated with digital technologies, turning us into active participants in a connected system that shapes and influences our actions, often in ways that challenge clear distinctions between humans and machines. **Becoming media: as activities** People often use multiple media simultaneously---mostly unaware of the concurrent exposure involved. This multiplication of mediated experiences not only contributes to a lack of awareness of media in our lives; it also amplifies and accelerates an ongoing fusion of all domains of life (such as home, work, school, love, and play) with and in media If our media activities turn us into beings neither living nor dead, entities beyond conceptual capture in terms of the aliveness of humanity or deadness of technology, the zombie is perhaps a fitting abstraction to appreciate the increasing integration of our lives (and bodies) with technology and media, inevitably producing ambivalent and incongruous outcomes, experiences, and feelings. **Becoming media: as arrangements** As stated at the outset of this book, the conflation of a pandemic with an infodemic and considering these just as dangerous to people's lives all over the world is a clear indication that our lifeworld has become mediatized  **Research on how people use media consistently documents that** - people's exposure to deliberately misleading information (about COVID19 or any other issue) is generally quite limited; - when confronted with an overabundance of information, people typically process all of this in a variety of active, idiographic, and at times quite critical ways and are overall less likely to take things at face value if the topic concerns something they have direct personal experience with; - the source of most misinformation tends to be political leaders and other authorities rather than social (or any other particular) media; and - throughout periods of mass upheaval (such as the global coronavirus crisis), people tend to turn to legacy news media and trust science more than they otherwise do. It is questionable that the role of media in people's lives is that of an independently operating outside agitator making us think and do things we would otherwise never consider.  The role of media in this unavoidable experience of unreality makes it more likely that we will share somewhat inauthentic information about ourselves through the interaction between the circuit of artifacts, activities, and social arrangements of online social networks, including: - platform interface design that encourages the sharing of beautiful, funny, and ostensibly happy slices of life; - built-in software properties that enliven photographs and videos to fit the characteristics of visual communication people are accustomed to in commercial media production; - positive, visually rich, and emotive updates tend to become more visible (as pushed by platform algorithms that determine what kind of posts people get to see first) and get more likes and comments, which inspires people to contribute more of the same kind of updates; - the same reasons we can have for participating in a global surveillance society (see the conclusion of chapter 3) compel us to sharing the best parts of our lives online: smart technologies making sharing straightforward and easy, sharing stirring news tends to get more likes and comments and keeps us connected to people near and far, making us feel seen and heard (in ways that we can somewhat control), all of which in turn can make us feel good. Suggestions have, for example, been made that some kind of mediology should replace ontology as the primary source of how and what we can know about the world. ... This paved the way for a new type of branding to become dominant throughout the global media industries, focusing on a mix of emotive messages related to lifestyle, identity, and engagement as the key elements of contemporary advertising campaigns--- whether to promote a particular product (such as a soft drink or car) or a person (like a politician or influencer). campaigning for election to positions of national significance has become as much about how a candidate looks and feels like to voters as it is about the substance of their political message. To consider all the different ways in which media, as a social arrangement, have nestled themselves in even the most fundamental processes of society and across the intimacies of everyday life (as we explore in the next chapter on love), we are confronted with the very real possibility that trying to maintain a line between us and our media may take away a significant option we have when faced with a digital environment of pervasive and ubiquitous media: to (re)connect with reality in and through media. **Real Life** In some circumstances, questioning reality and truthfulness is a luxury effectively exploited by propagandists, while in other cases willfully embracing a more fluid reading of information can contribute to better understanding between people. People find their way in media through an at times unsettling mix of device dependency and the dizzying freedom information and communication technologies provide, juggling attention, boredom, and distraction in an always-on digital environment, trying to strike a balance between authenticity and visibility. It is, above all, an emotional roller-coaster, while also providing plenty of challenges regarding media and information literacies. Week 5 Chapter 5 of Life in Media Love Life Media play both an enabling and corrupting role: it is through media we can build and sustain relations at a distance, yet it is those same media that amplify noise, misunderstanding, and *polysemy*\* (as content always contains multiple meanings, dependent on context). *polysemy*\* -- the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase. We consider all the different ways in which we can think about media love based on the three distinct building blocks of thinking about media, society, and everyday life used throughout media studies:  1. Understanding media as *practice* related to love, allowing us to focus on the various ways in which people use media in everyday life to find and maintain love, to make love, and what happens when their love for media gets out of control  2. Exploring the *mediation* of love, an approach that deals with the circulation and appropriation of information and ideas via media (as institutions) about love---such as popular depictions in literature and film of romantic love in general and of love involving humans and their media in particular 3. Appreciating the *mediatization* of love, a speculative way of looking at the central and historical role media play for our understanding and expression of love---specifically our love for media Such resistance to, reluctance about, or subtle redirection of the topic of love in media studies can be explained by a variety of reasons:  - Media and communication researchers until quite recently did not really consider nor study the human body and its role in how we use and make sense of our media. As all emotions are inevitably embodied and involve some kind of expression (in other words, we feel something and talk about it), studying people's feelings about media necessarily involves taking the body into consideration.  - Love traditionally has been associated with the realm of women, the home, the private, and the apolitical, and all its related emotions and experiences therefore were considered less relevant or important compared to the privileged place rational discourse, politics, and the economy were afforded in scholarship and public debate. - Until well into the twentieth century, love was generally not considered to be such a fundamental feeling---its presence in academic discourse, in literature, and in music still quite limited and its role as a cornerstone of, for example, committed romantic relationships seen as much less fundamental than it is today. - Love as a distinct field of study---love studies---is still a nascent field, emerging from a growing awareness in numerous scientific disciplines that our feelings and bodies play a profound role in how we make sense of the world around us and that such an awareness matters in that it opens up new lines of inquiry and new ways of appreciating how the experience of life (in media) is different and unique to every individual. One way of interpreting the persistence of misinformation and the fact that it tends to spread faster than factual information verified by society's experts is through the lens of love. One answer could be that we prefer the people and ideas we already know and love---including our self-love fueling the feeling of being "right"---over the supposedly rational discourse of strangers. Throughout history, people have relied on media of all kinds to inform themselves, to establish rules and rituals governing community life, to establish a sense of belonging, and simply to be entertained, including but not limited to - cave paintings in Spain and Indonesia depicting hunting routines and shamanic practices; - clay tablets documenting trade, royal protocols, and divine commandments; - papyrus scrolls containing political and trade agreements for the library archive; - hand-painted advertisements for sword fights, wrestling matches, and theater plays on the walls of ancient cities (across the Roman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, and China); - individually made books about important political figures, religious traditions, and the myths and legends of a particular society; and - all the mechanical and electronic media since the invention of the printing press, truly opening up media making and use to almost anyone. Our love for media is, to some extent, also a love for communion, for connection and contact with others (like us). And it is through media that we not just establish social bonds and build bridges between different people and groups---we also find, maintain, and sometimes break up romance and relationships. **The Practice of Media Love** Media love (couples find couple songs, parents watch TV with their kids and they take away their phones as punishment) Addiction to media People's relationship with media is invariably intimate, which at times can lead to problematic or harmful media use. While media scholars would hesitate to contribute to the medicalization of media use, it would behoove our field to stay mindful of people's intense, intimate, and indeed loving relations with media in all their various forms and manifestations. **The Mediation of Love** A prominent theme running throughout late twentieth-century and early twentyfirst-century popular culture is that of technologies providing people with sexual pleasure, such as - the "orgasmatron" in the 1964 French science fiction comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest and its motion picture adaptation Barbarella (1964, directed by Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda); - an electromechanical cube also called the "orgasmatron" in Woody Allen's film Sleeper (1973, starring Allen and Diane Keaton); and - high-tech headgear intended to substitute sexual intercourse in Demolition Man (1993, directed by Marco Brambilla, starring Sandra Bullock, Wesley Snipes, and Sylvester Stallone). **Mediatization of Love** The mediatization of love works in two ways. First, as a process in which all society's institutions---governments, political parties, companies and businesses, religious and nonprofit organizations, communities, and neighborhoods---have to adapt to the rules, aims, production logics, and constraints of the media to function. In all this, institutions find themselves facing a digital environment that requires a continuous mediated presence, including - operating and regularly updating a website, - being responsive to phone calls and email queries, - developing a social media strategy - looking to earn publicity through actions and campaigns that warrant the attention of media, and, in general, - always being available to the spotlight of media attention. After perusing the responses of these young people, the affective motivations they have for (their) media can be divided into four thematic categories: self-expression, identity, belonging, and passion. Together, these feelings help us to understand love for media, as well as appreciate how fundamental this love is to our humanity. Beyond self-expression, identity play, and developing a sense of belonging, a fourth love for media can be distinguished from the various accounts on the WhyIHeartMyMedia website: the ability to have, express, and give meaning to what could be considered more extreme emotions. The various examples of media activism (as documented in chapter 6) all serve as reminders of the affective and aspirational qualities of media, and how people in and through media not just make worlds, but also inject their love, hopes, and dreams into those worlds. Love is not just important as a topic because it is an essential element of all our motivations for using media---it is pivotal as a primary force inspiring and moving us. Active data: data about people's movements and activities 2\. Affective data: data about people's thoughts, ideas, feelings, and emotions 3\. Affordance (vs. functionality): the potential action that is possible by a given object or environment (versus the ability of a particular device or technology) 4\. Algorithm: a series of instructions telling a computer how to transform data into useful knowledge 5\. Ambient intimacy: being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy enhanced by (social) media 6\. Anti-surveillance: behavior intended to either avoid monitoring altogether or make observation more difficult to achieve 7\. Artificial intelligence: a self-learning group of algorithms 8\. Atypical work: work that people get paid for but without the benefits usually associated with formal employment (e.g., a contract, health care, pension plan) 9\. Augmented reality (AR): a direct or indirect view of a physical environment merged with or enhanced by virtual computer-generated imagery (see also: Mixed reality) 10\. Authenticity puzzle/contract: the delicate negotiation between media producers and consumers about what is fake or real 11\. Avatar activism: the appropriation of popular culture---such as film franchises, games, rock and pop music---for civic and protest purposes 12\. Blockbuster (see also Tentpole, triple-A): industry term for a best- selling media product such as a film or digital game 13\. Blockchain: a digital ledger of transactions duplicated and distributed across a network of computers instead of centrally organized by (for example) a bank 14\. Charismatic technologies: media that contribute to processes of personal transformation, identity formation, and expression 15\. Circuit of culture: concept that highlights interdependent relations between people and media, focusing on production, identity, representations, regulations, and consumption 16\. Clicktivism: the use of online media (such as social networks, websites, blogs, and vlogs) to publicize, promote, and support causes for social change 17\. Close reading of media: a systematic analysis of all aspects of a specific text, documenting the process in great detail to find out what it is trying to say 18\. Command line interface: an interface whereby users interact with a computer by typing in text commands to run programs and manage files 19\. Concurrent media exposure: being exposed to multiple media at the same time, whether people are aware of such exposure or not 20\. Convergence culture: the parallel integration of multiple media (in corporations and storytelling practices) and the cultures of media production and consumption (by inviting audiences to cocreate stories) 21\. Convergence logic: A creative decision-making process (in the media industry) that considers people as cocreators of products and services. 22\. Coveillance (see Synoptic surveillance, Inverse surveillance) 23\. Cross-media storytelling: to publish or push the same story using multiple forms of media 24\. Crowdfunding: raising money to finance projects and businesses from a large number of people via online platforms (such as Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Patreon) 25\. Crowdsourcing: obtaining work, information, ideas, or opinions from a large group of people who submit their contribution online (via 26\. Crunch time: working extreme overtime to get a media production project finished on deadline (term mainly used in the games industry) 27\. Cryptocurrencies: digital currency organized through a blockchain (see Blockchain) and protected by cryptography rather than a bank. 28\. Cultural analysis of media: analysis of media texts as a source of meaning for (and about) a particular culture or community. 29\. Cyborg: a cybernetic organism, partly human and partly machine 30\. Dark participation: various forms of malicious online participation, including offensive speech, hate speech, cyberbullying, producing and distributing fake news and conspiracy theories 31\. Data empathy: enriching the statistical analysis of big data with personal stories, backgrounds, and context that give meaning to the material 32\. Data glut: an overwhelming and ever-increasing amount of information gathered and stored (by individual people, organizations, or institutions) 33\. Data logic: a creative decision-making process (in the media industry) that is primarily oriented toward data, metrics, predictive analytics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) 34\. Data mining: finding patterns and relations in large data sets using statistical methods 35\. Data portability: controlling personal information based on open software standards allowing people to reuse their data across different applications online 36\. Dataveillance: the use of information and communication technologies in the surveillance of people, where data is primarily gathered (and analyzed) by computers 37\. Digital commons: a form of communal ownership of data, information, culture, and knowledge (possibly including underlying technological infrastructure and services) 38\. Digital culture: an emerging value system and set of practices and expectations as expressed in computer-mediated communication 39\. Digital democracy: democracy enhanced by information and communication technologies, enabling people to find information, engage in deliberation, and participate in political decision-making online 40\. Digital disconnection/detox: a range of practices related to disconnecting or disengaging from (online) media for different purposes, including protest and activism, self-regulation and health, freedom and sustainability 41\. Digital divide: the gap between people with a high degree of access to information and communication technologies and those with limited access or no access at all 42\. Digital inequality: differences between people in the material, cultural, and cognitive resources required to use information and communication technology 43\. Digital shadow: the information you create about yourself and the information others (including algorithms) create about you online 44\. Disinformation: the dissemination of false or misleading information with the deliberate intent to manipulate and deceive 45\. Double articulation (of media and society): media influence established processes in society, as well as independently creating routines within and across society's institutions 46\. Editorial logic: A creative decision-making process (in the media industry) that is primarily oriented toward (perceived) peers, colleagues, and competitors 47\. Egodocuments (or self-life writings): all forms of voluntary and involuntary autobiographical writing, such as memoirs, diaries, letters, travel accounts, blogs, vlogs, and social media posts 48\. ELIZA effect: people's tendency to anthropomorphize machines (often specifically referring to an artificial intelligence) 49\. Environment / ensemble / manifold / communicative figuration / intermediality (see also Concurrent media exposure): Different concepts to describe the sensation and experience of living with (and using) multiple media somewhat simultaneously 50\. Ephebiphobia: an irrational fear of adolescents or teenagers 51\. Everydayness: everyday experience is made up out of cycles (day and night, life and death, etc.) and repetitive behaviors, making life both mundane and always changing 52\. Frictionless sharing: steps platforms take to reduce friction and get people to spend more time online using their products and services; friction refers to deliberate choice in media use 53\. Functionality (vs. affordance): the ability of a particular device or technology (vs. the potential action that is possible by a given object or environment) 54\. Gender-bending: acting in away (online or offline) that defies or challenges traditional notions of gender, especially with respect to dress or behavior 55\. Graphic user interface: an interface that allows people to interact with electronic devices via visual indicators (such as menus, icons, pointers, and windows) 56\. Greenlighting: giving permission for a project to go ahead (generally involving financial expenditure) 57\. Hacking: the reconfiguration or reprogramming of a computer system to function in ways not intended by the producer(s) 58\. Hacktivism: the act of hacking (see Hacking) for politically or socially motivated purposes 59\. Halo effect: the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype 60\. Horizontal integration (of media industries): media companies consolidating and bundling their offerings across a variety of media channels 61\. Hourglass structure (of media industries): the media consist of a handful of big corporations, few middle-sized companies, and many tiny companies and single contractors 62\. Hybrid warfare: when a nation's government and military combine information warfare and cyberwarfare with conventional warfare 63\. Infodemic: a rapidly spreading large amount of information about a problem that is typically unreliable or the product of a disinformation Interface (see Command line interface, Graphic user interface, Natural user interface) 65\. Intertextual(ity) / intertextual referencing: parts of a media text (i.e., any work, object, or event that communicates meaning) that refer to other texts, for example, when media industries integrate characters and story lines across a variety of media 66\. Inverse surveillance (see Synoptic surveillance, Coveillance): a form of surveillance where the many observe and monitor the few 67\. Lean-forward media: media that (physically, emotionally, or cognitively) engage the user directly, requiring people to pay close attention 68\. Life in media / media life: media disappear, media are what people do, and people love media 69\. Market logic: a creative decision-making process (in the media industry) that is primarily oriented toward (intended or imagined) consumers, audiences, and markets 70\. Martini media: (making or using) media that are available anytime, anyplace, anyhow 71\. Mass self-communication: the circulation and reformatting of any digitally formatted content, generally consisting of egodocuments (see Egodocuments) posted online 72\. Material access to media: having access to media as determined by media artifacts (i.e., hardware and software) 73\. Materiality: the assumption that the physical properties of an artifact have consequences for how it is or can be used (see also Affordances, Functionality) 74\. Media activism (also, digital/cyberactivism): a form of activism that either has the media as the object to be reformed or uses a variety of media to further its goals of social or political transformation 75\. Media activities: the activities and practices involved when people use media 76\. Media archaeology: a way to think about material media cultures in a historical perspective (e.g., by taking media artifacts apart and tracing the genealogy of their constituent parts) 77\. Media arrangements: how people organize and coordinate their lives with and around media 78\. Media artifacts: the devices (i.e., hardware and software) people use to live in media 79\. Media as practice: studying the open-ended range of practices focused directly or indirectly on media (see also Media activities) 80\. Media multitasking: deliberate use of multiple media at the same time 81\. Media repertoire: a collection of media sources that people regularly use or a particular way in which people manage and use various media 82\. Mediatime: all the time people spend concurrently exposed to media 83\. Mediagenic: when something or someone fits the criteria for selection bymedia 84\. Mediation: the circulation and appropriation of information and ideas via media (as institutions) 85\. Mediatization: the process by which the media takes a prominent role in society, both as an industry and as the function that media have in the daily life of people and institutions 86\. Mediology: replacing ontology as the primary source of how and what we know about the world 87\. Meme(s): an idea (digitally represented in a phrase, image, video) that spreads from person to person by replication and adaptation (and is copied or changed along the way) 88\. Metaverse: (hard definition) a network of virtual worlds accessible via headsets or (soft definition) the notion of a seamlessly integrated media experience 89\. Metavoicing: reacting to other people's online presence and posts (particularly used in the context of activism) 90\. Microrebellions: acts of protest and resistance by one person (or only a few individuals), documented and shared on popular social media 91\. Motivational access to media: personal reasons for wanting to engage or not engage or participate with the media **92**. Natural user interface: an interface that makes you use electronic media using touch, gestures, or voice, in effect naturalizing the interface (and making it invisible) 93\. Neo-Luddite (or reform Luddite): someone who opposes (the indiscriminate use of) technology or believes the use of technology has problematic consequences 94\. Nowism (see also Presentism): excessive focus on the present or on immediate gratification 95\. Omnopticism (see Sousveillance): a situation where everyone monitors (or can monitor) everyone else 96\. Open source: an approach to software design where anyone can freely view, edit, modify, and distribute the source code 97\. Panopticism (see Vertical surveillance): the systematic ordering and controlling of people by their perception or knowledge of being under constant surveillance 98\. Participatory surveillance: the extent to which people willingly submit to having their personal information collected and tracked 99\. Passive data: data about people at a particular time and place 100\. Personal information economy: an economy where value is primarily extracted by the gathering of (or providing access to) personal data 101\. Pervasive media: media are always on, impossible to (completely) turn off 102\. Platform cooperatives: a collectively owned and democratically governed digital platform designed to provide a service or sell products 103\. Platformization: the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life and the reorganization of practices and imaginations around platforms 104\. Polysemy: media content always has multiple meanings 105\. Precarity: employment that is extremely unpredictable, where jobs tend to be irregular, often temporary, flexible, and casualized (see also Atypical work). 106\. Presentism (see also Nowism): the view that only the present exists 107\. Reciprocal surveillance (see also Omnoptic surveillance): a type of mutual surveillance, where people are monitoring each other potentially on a mass scale 108\. Relational labor: the work involved (for creative professionals, such as performers, artists, journalists, etc.) to build and sustain connections with audiences 109\. Remediation: all media are interdependent, in that media are always a remix of older media forms and newer ones 110\. Self-surveillance: the attention one pays to one's behavior when facing the actuality or virtuality of immediate or mediated monitoring 111\. Shadow profiling: using data collected about nonusers to create profiles of people who have never signed up for online social networks 112\. Sharenting: the practice of parents continually publishing and publicizing content about their children online (generally without consent) 113\. Shiny (New) Toy Syndrome: always wanting or being oriented toward the latest or newest piece of technology or gadget 114\. Singularity: the moment when humans merge completely with intelligent machines 115\. Sit-back media: media that require a low level of active (physical, emotional, or cognitive) engagement 116\. Skills access to media: media access shaped by the level of knowledge of how to manage and use media 117\. Slacktivism (see also Clicktivism): participating in media activism doing little more than messaging, following, or sharing hyperlinks online 118\. Social media: websites or devices that offer content and experiences generated by the users of those sites and devices 119\. Sousveillance (see Omnoptic surveillance): a form of reciprocal surveillance or coveillance, where everyone is (or can be) monitoring everyone else 120\. Speculative work: work that is unpaid but done in the hopes of securing future gigs, clients, or employment 121\. Splinternet: a trend whereby the global internet is fragmenting based on such factors as technology, commerce, religion, and divergent national interests 122\. Supersaturation (of media): the notion that media completely saturate the average household and in doing so become unremarkable 123\. Surveillance capitalism: collecting and mining personal data for profit 124\. Surveillance: the systematic monitoring of the many (i.e., people's behavior, actions, and communications) by the few (e.g., companies and government agencies) 125\. Synoptic surveillance (see Coveillance, Inverse surveillance): a type of surveillance where the many monitor the few 126\. Synthetic media: any kind of media that is produced through automated means 127\. Tactical media: "do-it-yourself" media of all kinds used by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture 128\. Technology bias: technological objects are not just passive or neutral instruments but actively connect us with the environment in which we live and in doing so shape our lived experience in particular ways 129\. Technomyopia: people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technology while simultaneously underestimating the long-term potential 130\. Teledildonics: using technology to mimic and extend sexual interaction 131\. Teleparenting: a parenting style where parents are in almost constant electronic touch with their children as they grow up 132\. Thingness: the actual state of being a (real, material) thing 133\. Transmedia storytelling: storytelling across multiple forms of media, with each element making distinctive contributions to people's understanding of the story 134\. Transmedia literacy: developing media literacy collaboratively across a variety of media based on people's existing knowledge, skills, and creativity 135\. Transliteracy: an approach to media and information literacy that helps people navigate and make use of a variety of media. 136\. Truman Show Delusion: feeling that the ordinary has changed, constantly searching for meaning, and experiencing a fluidity of the basic sense of identity. 137\. Ubiquitous computing: technology that works in the background, is intuitive and easy to use, is available anywhere, and is interconnected 138\. Ubiquitous media: the notion that media are everywhere, impossible to (completely) escape from 139\. Usage access to media: media access in terms of the time and types (e.g., uploading, downloading) of media use 140\. Vertical media integration: a media company buying up firms providing services in the same line of production (e.g., a film studio buying a movie theater chain)