What are you looking at?: Social Networking, Personal Info, Data Collection and Surveillance

Christian Fuchs, "Facebook: A Surveillance Threat to Privacy?"
Christian Fuchs, "Wikileaks: Can We Make Power Transparent?"

Mark Andrejevic, "We are all lab rats online"
Joshua Benton/Nieman Labs, "Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web"

Julian Assange, "Google Is Not What It Seems"
Henry Giroux, "Selfie Culture at the Intersection of the Corporate and Surveillance State"

If you want background resources relating to the screening of Laura Poitras' Citizenfour here are the related chapters from Glen Greenwald's No Place To Hide:

Chapter 3: Collect It All
Chapter 4: The Harm of Surveillance
Chapter 5: The Fourth Estate



Find below the segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which includes an interview with Edward Snowden which is both funny and unsettling:

Resisting Surveillance

Articles on Resisting Surveillance:

David Lyon, "Resisting Surveillance" from Surveillance After 9/11
John Gilliom, Resisting Surveillance

Surveillance, Reality TV and Celebrity Culture

Here are the readings for this week's discussion. Tie the readings to our initial discussion on Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure.

Vincent Pecora, The Culture of Surveillance
Nick Couldry (from Media Rituals), Live Reality and the Future of Surveillance
David Samuels, Shooting Britney
(also find this in html format here directly from The Atlantic Monthly website. nb. includes slide show on 'The Celebrity Hunters' not in the pdf file)

A couple of extra readings for those who are thinking of working on these issues for their final papers:

Nick Couldry (from Media Rituals), Mediated Self-Disclosure Before and After the Internet
Mark Andrejevic, The Webcam Subculture and the Digital Enclosure

Social Sorting and Premediation

These are the readings relating to our section on 'social sorting' and 'premediation'. Required readings are the first group of articles. Second group are highly recommended for further research. Also, everyone please read this recent article from The New York Times for class discussion --find it here.

Lyon, Everyday Surveillance: Personal Data and Social Classifications
Gandy, Race, Ethnicity and the Segmentation of Media Markets
Grusin, Premediation
Turow, Cracking the Consumer Code:Advertisers,Anxiety and Surveillance in the Digital Age

Tinic, (En)Visioning the Televisual Audience: Revisting Questions of Power in the Age of Interactive Television
Gandy, Data Mining, Surveillance and Discrimination in the Post 9/11 Environment
De Goede, Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post 9/11 Security Immagination

Last.fm: privacy invasion or site of resistance?

February 22nd, 2009 by Kevin Driscoll

Last Friday, TechCrunch posted an article provocatively titled, Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?. Based on a friend-of-a-friend tip, the piece alleged that Last.fm had “handed over” user data to facilitate the identification of U2 fans with leaked copies of the band’s forthcoming album, No Line on the Horizon. (This was before Universal Music Group copped to leaking the album and U2 started streaming it voluntarily.)

Within an hour and a half - midnight for the London-based Last.fm - the allegations were debunked. Employees responded to concerned readers directly,

“[Last.fm would] never personally identify our users to a third party.”

Last.fm’s reputation is saved, TechCrunch are lying liars, the RIAA still sucks, and then I found five dollars. Right?

Not quite. Last.fm, purchased by CBS Interactive in 2007, represents the tension driving this era in computing culture, a constant negotiation of value and privacy. I’ll enrich your database by telling you how many times I’ve rewound Las Mulas De Moreno today (five and counting) and you tell me about similar artists to obsess over tomorrow...

Read the rest of this post here.

Chomsky vs. Foucault

A classic encounter and a very revealing debate on the nature of power, nature and institutions between two authors that at this point most of you should be familiar with. Enjoy and be ready to discuss in class on Tuesday.

Panopticism

Jeremy Bentham, "The Panopticon Letters"
Michel Foucault, "Panopticism" extract from Discipline and Punish
You can find the original images that accompany the Foucault here.

Have the following readings completed, along with the first two chapters in the Lyon text by next week. Your assignment to accompany the readings is to watch The Truman Show (Peter Weir, USA, 1998) and Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, USA, 1998) and relate the concerns and dramatic features of the films to the issues raised around the issue of panopticism in the Foucault and Lyon texts. How is the panopticon being represented? What is not being considered? Are the problems raised by panopticism being contained in the films?

Lotsa Posts

Many posts all together. Doc, Surveillance and Pop Music classes all have new material and new reading assignments to look at. Scroll back or as usual use the tags/labels here on the side. Enjoy.

2007 Privacy Rankings

This is the link to the 2007 International Privacy Ranking Report developed by Privacy International. You can find the map that we looked at in class and the single country reports along with the criteria for the different rankings.

Also, please listen to these reports form this week's On The Media as they all revolve around issues of privacy, secrecy, transparency and surveillance.

NSA monitoring of domestic communications of American journalists.


President Obama's commitment to digital document transparency.


What if the ads you're watching are watching you back? A company called Quividi designs software that allows advertisers to guess your age and gender using tiny cameras inserted into billboards and video displays. Quividi's chief scientific officer Paolo Prandoni explains how the ads work.


And, finally, a report/article from Pop Matters, the online music magazine about the relationship of surveillance and hip-hop. Here.

1984

You can find George Orwell's 1984 on-line in its entirety here. Go directly to Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Below you can watch the famous 1984 commercial by Apple introducing the Mac to the world.