Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World by Daniel Trottier

Author:Daniel Trottier [Trottier, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Criminology
ISBN: 9781317053828
Google: -ObeCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1472455789
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Discussion

This chapter presents Facebook as a tool for institution-led surveillance. Social media in general and Facebook in particular have gained an unprecedented user base. These users, many of whom are students or employees in the academic sector, generate an ever-growing body of information that has become accessible and easily searchable. Universities and other institutions are using the information located on Facebook in their administrative duties. These practices began with employees bridging pre-existing knowledge about Facebook with institutional tasks, yet their involvement with sites like Facebook become more formal with time. In addition to individuals, institutions are also dwelling within the enclosure. They are in a position to watch over individual users, such as their students. But they too are made visible as a result of information about them that circulates online. Employees working on behalf of the university have experience managing the school’s reputation, as well as experience locating and monitoring students of interest. Nevertheless, the migration to social media is a challenging and disorienting process.

Social media’s use by universities is a recent emergence, but even at this stage some features are observable. First, Facebook’s origin as a domestic technology is a unique development for Surveillance Studies. Facebook and other social media were first used by individuals for interpersonal purposes. Yet individual users employed by post-secondary institutions also enable institutional surveillance through social media. This suggests that universities and other institutions harness interpersonal relations in order to further the institutional control of target populations. In particular, they are using the site to identify relevant categories, such as student parties and hate speech. Domestic technology can compromise the private realm, such as when television reconfigures the homestead (Silverstone and Haddon 1996). Yet social media is a technology that was exclusively used in a domestic setting, and is now adopted by institutions. This is an unusual kind of diffusion, and the fact that it is spreading so aggressively is doubly strange. Starting in university dormitories, it now encapsulates institutions and workplaces. As enclosures, Facebook and other social media have an expansive social reach.

Second, social media are both a means for the university to watch over the student population, as well as an enclosure for the university to be made visible. Individual users were initially more familiar with social media, and thus able to use them to the detriment of the academy (Beer and Burrows 2007). The university was exposed, and some of its less desirable features were put onto a searchable and archived enclosure. This was especially a concern for the university described in this chapter because of its reputation for riotous parties and overt racism. Yet such concerns can be extended to other institutions, as we will see in the Chapter 5. This speaks to the nature of visibility on social media enclosures like Facebook. While they were initially designed to make individuals visible, they are also capable of pushing an institution’s reputation into the public eye. Moreover, institutions have little control over the fact that they now dwell on social media.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.