Mobile Journalists as Traceable Data Objects: Surveillance Capitalism and Responsible Innovation in Mobile Journalism (original) (raw)

Critical Theory in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: How to Regulate the Production and Use of Personal Information in the Digital Age

Law & Social Inquiry

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a landmark text for many reasons (Zuboff 2019). To begin with, it is driven by the highest theoretical ambition put to the service of enlightening the general public about the fundamental threats to our freedom and dignity represented by the unprecedented and unaccountable concentrations of knowledge and power in the hands of a few capitalists. Many readers will be aware of the context in which these broad changes have happened-namely, the alliance between digital and social media companies and national security agencies formed after 9/11. They will also have heard of the scandals that have sporadically burgeoned at the surface of the public's attention, like the use of personal data to derive voting predictions by Cambridge Analytica, whose practices, as Shoshana Zuboff (2019) reveals, were not very different from the daily operation of the more established "surveillance capitalist" companies. But reading this book makes us understand that few of us are aware of the nature and scale of the operations through which such accumulation of power/ knowledge operates and its effects on our freedom. CRITICAL THEORY IN THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM To describe these processes, Zuboff coins a series of new concepts-uncontract, behavioral surplus, predictive markets, division of learning, shadow texts-which are systematically organized into a novel theory of value extraction and distribution in the new ("surveillance") phase of contemporary capitalism. These new concepts are abstract on purpose, as the new vocabulary she introduces helps us move away from

Reluctant activists? The impact of legislative and structural attempts of surveillance on investigative journalism

Big Data & Society, 2016

If we accept that surveillance by the State and ‘sousveillance’ by the media in Western democracies tend towards a relative equilibrium, or ‘equiveillance’ supported by the function of journalism as a watchdog and that the rule of law largely protects fundamental freedoms, this paper argues that the act of ‘mutual watching’ is undesired by the State and comes at a very high cost to journalists. The combination of technological capacity, legislative change and antidemocratic sentiments of the State, in the context of its willingness and ability to collect and process Big Data on an unprecedented scale, disrupt the preconditions for a strong democracy based on free media and free citizens. This paper examines the politics of investigative journalism under the conditions of dominance of the State by investigating the experiences of journalists with surveillance. Our interviews with 48 journalists show that journalists are acutely aware of surveillance and its noxious impact. Well beyon...

Human-technology relations in an age of surveillance capitalism: Towards an anthropological theory of the dialectic between analogue and digital humanity

EtnoAntropologia, 2021

What can anthropology contribute to the current debates about the negative effects of social media on people? Starting from a critique of anthropological work that sees human subjectivity and culture as ontologically unaffected by social media use, I propose that human engagement with these digital technologies produces significant ontological transformations that deserve more attention. I develop my analysis in dialogue with Boellstorff's ontology of the digital, Nardi's theorisation of virtuality and affordances, and Zuboff's formulation of surveillance capitalism, and I use empirical illustrations from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to highlight key theoretical junctures. My main contribution is an outline of an anthropological theory of the dialectic between what I call analogue humanity and digital humanity. The two are mutually constituted but ontologically distinct. In the current political economy of digitalisation, tech companies are driving a process of increasing substitution of analogue humanity and forms of life with digital ones, as part of their quest for accurate prediction and social engineering of all aspects of human behaviour. While an anti-technology stance is neither practicable nor desirable, anthropologists need to think about how analogue humanity can be preserved and nurtured so that it can avoid ontological extinction.

QAHTAN. F. (2017)Digital Journalism and the portable Devices Role for the Knowledge of society Development. Media Research Journal. pp (129-132) ISSN 2249-5843

2017

The birth of touchscreen-enabled portable devices, offered with flat-rate subscriptions for mobile internet, that widespread production and use of news-related content and services began to flourish people’s life and society. Digital devices present a bewildering array of choices for journalists – producing slideshows and video, joining social networks and blogging, using portable devices and smart phones. That seems endless elements for the person to mention them and their benefits for human society in this century. But the requires of understanding all these new technologies is very important so journalists and news organizations can make informed decisions about why and how to utilize them (such as Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business). This trends that are disrupting the news industry and changing the way journalists do their jobs and contributes hardly in the knowledge of society development. The aim of this paper is to get more people who consume news online, news organizations face the dilemma of reallocating resources to attract new readers and viewers while still trying to hold on to their existing and audiences for the knowledge improving which deals to the society development by: online news, newspapers, magazines, also make interested people use digital journalism and portable device to learn best practices for on-camera interviewing, use new tools for creating and posting quick videos, gifs, and images for audience engagement, and learn to create interactive data visualizations, charts, graphs and maps to add them to their visual storytelling tool box. This paper discusses the importance of online mobile journalism, as the past decade use television to broadcast any news. In future people may see many other technologies far better than mobile journalism. Cell phones and smart phones are now much more productive in news recording from even in hand or pocket for all people.

The Secret of Justice, Privacy and Journalism, in the era of Digital Capitalism

The article addresses human rights, in particular freedom of expression and the right to privacy, including on the Internet, proposing to emphasize the issue of their dialectics in the context of contemporary digital society that, in the face of the digitization of modern life, face many challenges. It becomes necessary in this way, understand, through a theoretical review, the history of fundamental humanrights, through historical reference documents; a psychosocial analysis of the concepts of Freedom and Privacy; the normative framework in which they fall; the Internet as a platform for exercising rights and freedoms; and the problems associated with it; digital data, people's movements; citizen surveillance; social engineering of power; online social networks and e-commerce, spaces of trust and conflict.

Epistemology of mobile journalism

2021

The fast and global way which has characterized the presence of mobile phones in society has sparked the interest of several sectors of activity, including journalism. From the early stages of production to distribution, and then through the characteristics of content and consumption patterns, numerous changes have been introduced by these mobile devices in an activity that has been undergoing one of the most uncertain moments in its long history. This uncertainty has stemmed from the decrease in income which was caused by the emergence of new competitors, such as the online press and social networks. This bibliographic review aims at identifying the changes caused by smartphones in the production distribution and consumption of news, analyzing its effect on the epistemology of journalism. We attempt to ascertain if the increasing influence of mobile technologies in the journalistic activity has changed its nature, improving the production of knowledge. Upon closer reading of the bi...

New Media and the power politics of sousveillance in a surveillance-dominated world

Surveillance & Society

In this paper we address the increasingly complex constructs between power, and the practices of looking, in a mediated, mobile and networked culture. We develop and explore a nuanced understanding and ontology that examines veillance in both directions: surveillance and oversight, as well as sousveillance and “undersight”. In particular, we unpack the new relationships of power and democracy facilitated by mobile and pervasive computing. We differentiate between the power relationships in the generalized practices of looking or gazing, which we place under the broad term “veillance”. Then we address the more subtle distinctions between different forms of veillance that we classify as surveillance and sousveillance, as well as McVeillance (the ratio of surveillance to sousveillance). We start by unpacking this understanding to develop a more specialized vocabulary to talk not just about oversight but also to talk about the implications of mobile technologies on “who watches th...

Society in the shackles of surveillance capitalism

Economic Science for Rural Development

The rapid development of information and communications technologies has changed the lives of both - society as a whole and individuals in it. The world is becoming a huge system for gathering, storing, and sharing information. Large amounts of data are collected, stored, analysed, and used for commercial purposes. Prominent American sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls this process "surveillance capitalism." This paper aims to analyse the tools of surveillance capitalism and the influence of surveillance capitalism on public choices and behaviour. It is based on empirical information collected using several research methods - a survey (n = 204), semi-structured interviews (n = 5), and qualitative content analysis. The paper analyses three popular surveillance capitalists' online tools - Google search, Facebook, and Twitter and gives insights into society's preferences and behaviour patterns concerning ways of obtaining information and attitudes towards privacy and se...