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Pablo Velasco // Information Studies // pablov.me
Social surveillance is the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip, and inquiry that consitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitalization normalized by social media
(…)
the nature of "surveillance" dynamically changes based on the social role played by observer and observant
Marwick, A. E. (2012). Social Surveillance in Everyday Life
Persistent Surveillance Systems
e.g. Radiolab: Eye in the sky
Surveillance model | Capture model |
---|---|
visual metaphors | linguistic metaphors |
non-disruptive watching | "parsing" of activities for re-organisation |
territorial metaphor (invasion) | assembled from "parts" |
centralized/bureaucratic | decentralized and heterogenous |
identification with the state | mathematical formalism |
Agre, P. E. (1994). Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy
NOT mutually exclusive models!
*Compstats in Brooklyn Nine-Nine (S01E15)
"The crime rate itself became the boss"
"The people who started running CompStat didn't understand it"
Agre, P. E. (1994). Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy.
Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system (Hal Varian)
"Surveillance Capitalism is not a technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action" (15)
"Machine intelligence" -> analysis, Machine Learning, prediction, recognition, modeling…
Hmm… Machine intelligence seems to be used quite broadly and I can't quite wrap my head around where the borders are. Google themselves refer to things like language translation, speech recognition and prediction as machine intelligence (Mathilde)
Recommendation systems
The Napoleon Dynamite problem
When we predict a visualization based on a sample of data and then feed more data to test the accuracy of our prediction in the visualization (Laura)
Instead of 'fordist' production, Google UPI (user profile information) extraction and analysis tailored to advertisment (ends)
Unique mix (means): behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms ("machine intelligence")
"instrumentarianism" power -> shape human behaviour to other's ends
Behavioural knowledge, manipulation, and prediction: microtargeting as a combination of politics and consumer marketing, and the capacity of manipulation of affective states (O'Neil 2017)
https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/trackers-gephi-dmi/
DMI version (in development, but you can export directly to gephi): https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/brightbeam
Also, tracker-tracker (exports to gephi): https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/trackerTracker/
Install Thunderbeam-Lightbeam for chrome here
Try doing the same with your adblockers on. Is there a substantial difference? You can try different adblockers.