The public discourse on surveillance capitalism

Description

Digital methods will be employed to collect and analyze data from online news media outlets and Twitter. The sources have been chosen because we are interested in exploring both the debate developing around news, promoted by news media outlets, and the interactions between institutional (politicians, corporations etc.) and regular users developing on social media platforms. Data from news media outlets will be collected through open source tools (e.g. Googlescarper and Media Cloud) by following ad hoc keywords. Data from Twitter will be collected through the academic Twitter API. Data analysis will be based on both manual and automated techniques of network, content and sentiment analysis.

Goals
  • to identify the main actors involved in the public online debate on surveillance capitalism in Italy
  • to map the main discourses characterizing and shaping the public online debate on surveillance capitalism in Italy
  • to explore changes over time in actors and discourse composition in the public online debate on surveillance capitalism in Italy
  • to identify key issues to be further investigated in WP3 and WP4
  • to identify possible key informants to be involved in the empirical research planned for WP4
Team member
Alessandro Caliandro

Researcher

Alessandro Caliandro

Dario Pizzul

Researcher

Dario Pizzul

Flavio Ceravolo

Researcher

Flavio Ceravolo

Guido Anselmi

Researcher

Guido Anselmi

Guido Legnante

Principal Investigator

Guido Legnante

Marco Gui

WP Coordinator

Marco Gui

Piercarlo Dondi

Researcher

Piercarlo Dondi

Outputs

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LET'S TALK - Il capitalismo della sorveglianza

LET'S TALK - Il capitalismo della sorveglianza

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Evento Auser - 1 Dicembre 2022

Evento Auser - 1 Dicembre 2022

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Surveillance & Society Rotterdam Conference 2022

Surveillance & Society Rotterdam Conference 2022

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STS Conference - 28-30 June 2023

STS Conference - 28-30 June 2023

article

The value of digital data: a study on older workers in Italy

The value of digital data: a study on older workers in Italy

document

Research Centres and Initiatives

Research Centres and Initiatives

Hereby a useful directory of Initiatives and Research Centres working on several issues and topics related to surveillance capitalism (such as dataveillance, data activism, data ethics, data privacy & transparency, platform surveillance, etc.)

Open the spreadsheet and contact us if you want to contribute to the list.

document

Rotterdam Conference

Rotterdam Conference

Hereby the slides that we presented at the 2022 Surveillance & Society Rotterdam Conference. Each set of slides is accompanied by the related abstract.

A systematic literature review of surveillance capitalism towards a research agenda

Although surveillance capitalism - as intended by Shoshana Zuboff - is an emerging topic, it already attracted the attention of many scholars from different fields within social sciences. Therefore, in this contribution we propose a systematic literature review of the topic of surveillance capitalism. Specifically, we developed a systematic literature review on a pool of 161 academic articles automatically extracted (through a Python script) from ad hoc scientific sources (e.g., Scopus), which we processed with computational techniques of text analysis (e.g., co-word analysis, topic modelling, TF-IDF). Also, a close reading of a sample of 30 articles was conducted. Results show that the topic of surveillance capitalism is composed by six main sub-topics: marketing & social control, big data & datafication, platforms & platformization, data privacy & protection, culture of surveillance, AI. We argue that all these key sub-topics need to be addressed attentively (or at least taken into consideration) when dealing with academic research and/or writing on surveillance capitalism, also paying attention on how each dimension inform and co-construct each other.

Mapping the culture of surveillance capitalism on Twitter

Although surveillance capitalism is already well-established in advanced economies, we can argue that the current Covid-19 emergence has probably accelerate the diffusion of surveillance capitalism logics and infrastructures (e.g., platformization of higher education). Despite the pervasiveness and currency of this phenomenon, we still know very little about how the general public perceives and frames it. In particular, there is a shortage of empirical research on citizens’ opinions towards surveillance capitalism as well as their level of awareness about the processes of data exploitation and value extraction carried out by corporate platforms on the very data users produce through their everyday digital practices. To address this research gap, we developed an exploration (based on digital methods) on dataset of 302k Italian tweets (collected by following ad hoc keywords, such as ‘surveillance + Facebook’, ‘surveillance + iPhone’, etc). We analyzed this dataset combining computational and qualitative techniques – network analysis, topic modelling, ethnographic content analysis. Our preliminary results show that, on a general level, Twitter users seem unable to distinguish between processes of surveillance upon citizens and consumers (which they consider basically the same thing). Anyhow, on a micro level, specific communities of users tend to develop different narratives on surveillance capitalism, imagining different ‘models’ of it (such as, dystopian surveillance, benevolent surveillance, conspiracy surveillance, entertainment surveillance).

Algorithmic countersurveillance Immuni on Reddit

This research proposes a reflection on the implications of dataveillance (based on algorithms) and practices of countersurveillance in the healthcare field. Countersurveillance is the practice of making surveillance activities of institutions difficult or implementing technologies to evade surveillance altogether. Countersurveillance achieves its goal by subverting various components of the surveillance process and it has many applications. It can be used to protect privacy, civil liberties, and against abuses of surveillance. Additionally, it may be employed to push surveillance systems beyond their breaking point and in doing so it identifies potential vulnerabilities and points of error. Many countersurveillance techniques use human methods rather than electronic; these activities might include ‘evasion’ (e.g., avoiding risky locations, being discreet or using code words), ‘being situation-aware’; ‘hiding in secure locations’; and ‘concealing one’s identity’. Through this proposal we want to explore resistance practices and imaginaries applied to algorithmic surveillance in the health domain. Specifically, we explore the debate on the Immuni App on Reddit.

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Summer School - Digital Methods for Critical Consumer Studies & Surveillance 2023

Summer School - Digital Methods for Critical Consumer Studies & Surveillance 2023

A research project by:

Università di PaviaUniversità degli Studi di Milano BicoccaUniversità Cattolica di MilanoCareof

Funded by:

Fondazione Cariplo

Contact us:

Drop a message to alessandro.caliandro@unipv.it - twitter - facebook - researchgate