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Social Media as Surveillance
While there is a lot of popular and academic interest in social media, this is the first academic work which addresses its growing presence in the surveillance of everyday life. Some scholars have considered its impact on privacy, but these efforts overlook the broader risks for users. Commonsense recommendations of care and vigilance are not enough, as attempts to manage an individual presence are complicated by the features which make social media 'social'. Facebook friends routinely expose each other, and this information leaks from one context to another. This book develops a surveillance studies approach to social media by presenting first hand ethnographic research with a variety of personal and professional social media users. Using Facebook as a case-study, it describes growing monitoring practices that involve social media. What makes this study unique is that it not only considers social media surveillance as multi-purpose, but also shows how these different purposes augment one another, leading to a rapid spread of surveillance and visibility. Individual, institutional, market-based, security and intelligence forms of surveillance therefore co-exist with each other on the same site. Not only are they drawing from the same interface and information, but these practices also augment each other. This groundbreaking research considers the rapid growth and volatility of social media technology by treating these aspects as central to social media surveillance.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2012
About the author
Daniel Trottier
13 books1 followerDaniel Trottier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research considers the use of social media by police and intelligence agencies, as well as other forms of policing that occur on these platforms. As part of this research, he has participated in two European Commission projects on security, privacy and digital media. Daniel has authored several articles in peer-reviewed journals on this and other topics, as well as Social Media as Surveillance with Ashgate in 2012, Identity Problems in the Facebook Era with Routledge in 2013, and Social Media, Politics and the State (co-edited with Christian Fuchs) with Routledge in 2014.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2013
(to be published in Cultural Sociology)
Over the last decade, social media has grown to a global, mainstream phenomenon that pervades culture, business and technology. At the center of this development is Facebook, the California-based company founded in 2004, which today hosts 1 billion users. Not surprisingly, this company has been at the center of many debates over privacy concerns on the internet. Daniel Trottier’s interesting, timely and well-informed new book takes such discussions a step further by focusing not only on potential privacy invasions, but on social media as (and for) surveillance and how this fundamentally changes visibility.
The main part of the book consists of four chapters each dedicated to a specific type of social media surveillance identified by Trottier: Interpersonal, institutional, market and policing. The first one of these, interpersonal social media surveillance, is perhaps the most distinctive practice in this connection, because it addresses the way we use surveillance to facilitate social interaction. The analysis and discussion is based on meticulous interviews with social media users, in this case students who especially in the earlier days constituted Facebook’s core user group. These interviews with involved actors - students, universities, employers, authorities, etc. - is a source of inspiration, sometimes trivial information, but also some surprises.
The other three types of social media surveillance are more well-known territory for students of surveillance. The chapter on institutional surveillance deals with different kinds of organizations that use surveillance technologies and practices to keep track of, assist and control certain groups, e.g. universities and students, and employers and employees. Market surveillance is about businesses gathering and processing information about customers (and potential customers) to increase and improve sales. And finally, there is a chapter on different kinds of policing activities going on, obviously, involving how authorities navigate in the new world of social media (harvesting information, communicating, covert activities, etc.), but also how self-policing and consensual community regulations work through these new visibilities.
Reading through these types of surveillance activities and all the ways of dealing with visibility, it is quite clear that surveillance leads to a lot of new opportunities - not only for organizations and authorities to spy on people, but also to facilitate social interaction, expand communication and empower individuals. However, it is even more clear that this new social media surveillance leads to confusion and paradoxes. Maybe not surprisingly, organizations and authorities have some difficulty in finding ways to properly engage with social media, and it will definitely take time before they will find their feet in this new world. Even more interesting, while individuals use and obviously enjoy social networking, there is still an acknowledgement of a conflict, as these surveillance practices are sometimes referred to as “stalking” and “creeping”. Why would anyone enjoy taking part in something (as both watcher and watched) which they themselves think of as dubious? This paradox reveals that many of us don’t know how to describe, think and talk about the surveillance practices that we really want to engage with. The vocabulary of fear, privacy invasion and corporate exploitation does not give us an adequate answer, but Trottier’s book certainly give us material to ask the questions.
There is an elephant in the room of this book, and his name is Karl Marx. The book discusses capitalism, labour and exploitation, but there isn’t any mention of Marx or Marxism, and even the engagement with neo-Marxism is scarce. This is surprising, but it is also a shame, because this approach to surveillance and social media seems to be on the rise with a number of notable publications in recent years. Interesting questions are not addressed in the otherwise thorough theoretical chapter, including: Can we use Marx at all to understand today’s social media culture, and if yes (the author seems to think so), how can Marxism be applied? Can we understand the culture of social media without understanding it through the lense of ideology, economy and political struggle?
Trottier’s book is clearly a sociological account, but it is also an interesting read for academics from other disciplines interested in surveillance issues relating to and emerging from social media. The empirical work might have a limited time of relevance, because of the accelerated nature of this field, however, a number of relevant and thought-provoking issues are introduced and discussed which make the book worthwhile.
Over the last decade, social media has grown to a global, mainstream phenomenon that pervades culture, business and technology. At the center of this development is Facebook, the California-based company founded in 2004, which today hosts 1 billion users. Not surprisingly, this company has been at the center of many debates over privacy concerns on the internet. Daniel Trottier’s interesting, timely and well-informed new book takes such discussions a step further by focusing not only on potential privacy invasions, but on social media as (and for) surveillance and how this fundamentally changes visibility.
The main part of the book consists of four chapters each dedicated to a specific type of social media surveillance identified by Trottier: Interpersonal, institutional, market and policing. The first one of these, interpersonal social media surveillance, is perhaps the most distinctive practice in this connection, because it addresses the way we use surveillance to facilitate social interaction. The analysis and discussion is based on meticulous interviews with social media users, in this case students who especially in the earlier days constituted Facebook’s core user group. These interviews with involved actors - students, universities, employers, authorities, etc. - is a source of inspiration, sometimes trivial information, but also some surprises.
The other three types of social media surveillance are more well-known territory for students of surveillance. The chapter on institutional surveillance deals with different kinds of organizations that use surveillance technologies and practices to keep track of, assist and control certain groups, e.g. universities and students, and employers and employees. Market surveillance is about businesses gathering and processing information about customers (and potential customers) to increase and improve sales. And finally, there is a chapter on different kinds of policing activities going on, obviously, involving how authorities navigate in the new world of social media (harvesting information, communicating, covert activities, etc.), but also how self-policing and consensual community regulations work through these new visibilities.
Reading through these types of surveillance activities and all the ways of dealing with visibility, it is quite clear that surveillance leads to a lot of new opportunities - not only for organizations and authorities to spy on people, but also to facilitate social interaction, expand communication and empower individuals. However, it is even more clear that this new social media surveillance leads to confusion and paradoxes. Maybe not surprisingly, organizations and authorities have some difficulty in finding ways to properly engage with social media, and it will definitely take time before they will find their feet in this new world. Even more interesting, while individuals use and obviously enjoy social networking, there is still an acknowledgement of a conflict, as these surveillance practices are sometimes referred to as “stalking” and “creeping”. Why would anyone enjoy taking part in something (as both watcher and watched) which they themselves think of as dubious? This paradox reveals that many of us don’t know how to describe, think and talk about the surveillance practices that we really want to engage with. The vocabulary of fear, privacy invasion and corporate exploitation does not give us an adequate answer, but Trottier’s book certainly give us material to ask the questions.
There is an elephant in the room of this book, and his name is Karl Marx. The book discusses capitalism, labour and exploitation, but there isn’t any mention of Marx or Marxism, and even the engagement with neo-Marxism is scarce. This is surprising, but it is also a shame, because this approach to surveillance and social media seems to be on the rise with a number of notable publications in recent years. Interesting questions are not addressed in the otherwise thorough theoretical chapter, including: Can we use Marx at all to understand today’s social media culture, and if yes (the author seems to think so), how can Marxism be applied? Can we understand the culture of social media without understanding it through the lense of ideology, economy and political struggle?
Trottier’s book is clearly a sociological account, but it is also an interesting read for academics from other disciplines interested in surveillance issues relating to and emerging from social media. The empirical work might have a limited time of relevance, because of the accelerated nature of this field, however, a number of relevant and thought-provoking issues are introduced and discussed which make the book worthwhile.
April 11, 2016
This book didn't say anything new. It needed a non-academic editor to cut down on words and repetition.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews