W11 reading response-surveillance capitalism

Social media surveillance is something we take for granted. It’s all around us and we can’t evade it, even if we want to. Most people embrace. What interests me is the questions about what is happening to the personal information that flows through and sometimes floods the internet using social media. Although there is an inestimable amount of personal data floating around on the internet. Few people seem to realize just how accessible it is out there to be harvested.

On the one hand, social media is all about user-generated content. On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg and the media platforms are trading in personal information and that is where they get their profit. What they are actually doing and trying to do is surveillance. They are using those personal data in order to try to influence us as consumers in order to shape our self-identity and help us to engage in the world in particular ways. It’s not surprising that schools, employers, police department, security companies and other government departments, they are all very interested in the world of social media to get personal data. To take employers as an example, it is sobering to realize that an increasing number of employers use social media in addition to the conventional resume. Some research shows that 76% of the photos on Facebook in Britain show users in an inebriated state.

Social media is driven by what we call a market logic and the market logic is that they’re trying to create categories, make profiles of us and find out what they can put together a composite picture of who we are. Apparently, Facebook has a gift for that and other social media platforms are the same. Instead of them dreaming up the categories, we contribute to those categories. Every time we post some images, every time that we make a post online, we are contributing something about our tastes, our preferences, what our musical tastes are, also in food preferences, political affiliations and religious commitments, just name it. The process of making those categories is something to which we contribute. Anybody who is trolling through those data and trying to find out about us can make a composite picture of us from the preferences, tastes, and habits of our friends and so on. However those categories don’t necessarily fit how we might want to see ourselves so our visibility to the world to those organizations, to those corporations and so on our visibility may not be the way that we would want necessarily to present ourselves logic behind it may be somewhat misleading.

Today we are also doing the surveillance, tracking and monitoring others online. It goes beyond the Orwellian surveillance state. It’s something inside us. For better or worse we do surveillance. Here, I want to ask a question: whether it’s surveillance of other or surveillance for others.

I believe that surveillance on social media should foster human flourishing.

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