The Modern Surveillance Tactic - Essay Example

Social Surveillance Social sites are applications generally defined as web 2.0. They are web-founded podiums that incorporate diverse media, communication and information technologies, which permit at least the creation of profiles that show information defines the clients, the indication of connections list, the formation of relations amongst users that are shown on their contact lists and the chats between end-users (Fuchs 2009). Social surveillance involves the use of the web 2.0 sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to see what family, acquaintances and friends are “up to” (DHS 12). These technologies are mainly designed for users to continually monitor digital traces left behind by people they are attached to through social networking sites. The envisioned usage of Facebook, for instance, is to “share and link with the societies in your life” by seeing the user profiles and News Feed (Galloway and Thacker 8). This information is publicized to be seen, and as such, individuals can look carefully. The assemblage of practices outlined like watching, creeping, stalking, or looking are distinctive to social media use, but this social surveillance produces panoptic types of paraphernalia. People display their information digitally with an audience in mind, often altering social media content to specific individuals (Galloway and Thacker 8). Strictly mediated publics are described by both high awareness of being under observation and watching. Information shared by users from these social networking sites are widely proliferating around the world without users noticing enough. Although social networking sites have become the most convenient ways to socialize with friends, the on-going problems of cyber surveillance and privacy intrusion are the excessive downsides of the social Medias’ merits. The fundamental idea of the social networking sites is that anyone can share his or her personal moment with friends from anywhere. Danah Boyd believes this social media phenomenon is welcoming to this technological industrialized era, but she also speaks the potential privacy intrusion that the majority of social media users often forget to remember when posting their personal documents online (Boyd 2008). Boyd states that in this linked public, while being considered to be the world influential invention of the 21th century, has four important aspects—persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences—to be understood before anyone, especially teenagers, posts personal images on these sites (Boyd 2008). To be specific, personal images and videos are lasting forever on the social networking sites, even if the owners have deleted them. Anyone can download and share someone’s private pictures without his or her permission. In addition, these private moments are easy to search using just few key words on Google by anonymous persons. On the contrary, consequences linked to social surveillance online are dangerous. For instance, Amanda Todd, a little girl from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, committed suicide at the age of fifteen after experienced blackmail by sexual extortionists in 2012. She has suffered from severe cyber bullies, which caused her to move different schools in her real life before her death on October 10th, 2012 (“The Sextortion”). The online invasion of privacy is a vigorous new issue of the Internet that pushes teenagers from the cliff of the real world. The modern surveillance tactic becomes smarter everyday by the newly developed technologies. CCTV around the every corner of buildings let guards to locate anyone from the short amount of time. M.G. Michael and Katina Michael describe surveillance as “the focused, methodical and monotonous attention to private details for purposes of management, direction influence, and protection.” Naturally, surveillance is an activity that empowers the state or entrepreneurial formations like organizations, to manage a populace (Michael et la 13). This commencement of surveillance includes an irregularity in which people are observed by structural entities, the stability of power devastatingly slanted in service of the inspectors. Individuals resist and comply with surveillance, a dynamic discussed by Margaret Nelson and Anita Garey, as the “dialectic of control” (Wittkower, D 13). For example, explanations of “sousveillance” include repurposing surveillance apparatus to watch the observers, either by recording the video of police department brutality at a Grave event or Tweeting about a demonstration march in Egypt (Michael et al 17). Digital communication tools are fundamental to modern surveillance practices, like wiretapping telephone dialogs, trailing individuals using biometric data, using infrared cameras to locate people in hiding, producing databanks to process and cumulate this data, and so forth (Nelson and Garey 12). Similarly, marketers, companies, and governments, in their quest to collect significant amounts of data about specific users, can use social media expertise. For instance, photo sharing sites like Flickr sums up user information with data integrated by its mother site Yahoo. Interacted adverts track users on websites, generating comprehensive pictures of their actions and demographics. Third party iPhone or Facebook applications can gather and distribute private data to actors separate to these networks. Wittkower separates three confidentiality issues surrounding the social sites. First, individuals use social media to distribute information on themselves, like posting photos online with potentially harmful effects, including reduced chances of future employment, housing, among others or intimate blog entries. Second, people share information concerning others, whether inadvertently or deliberately, through actions like replying by Twitter and face-photo tagging on Facebook. Third, social network site proprietors summarize and dispense information that users deliver to the site (Wittkower 23-33). Social surveillance essentially comprises the first two issues. Furthermore, various other researchers have associated surveillance to social media (Galloway and Thacker). In his study of lateral surveillance, Wittkower focuses primarily on other methods through which people “spy” on their friends such as is identified Friendster; people search tools, as a toll for investigating potential dates (Wittkower 23-33). In a study involving more than two thousand undergraduates, social searching emerged as the primary use of Facebook: using the site to study more about acquaintances, friends, and classmates, a different from social-browsing in which the sites are used to meet new friends (Galloway and Thacker 13). Some might say the online surveillance to make new friends from individual users are acceptable, but these personal friend searching activities are still potentially uncomfortable and invade individuals’ personal life. It is possible for anyone who can search around to find name, age, address, school, and a car of a specific person to harm in the near future. The power of digital photography on social media expands from old film photography. Today, a collection of digital photographs explores the affiliation of culture and art from inside the outline of social media. It discourses the manner in which the digital era is redefining our experience of space and time. The confusion surrounding intellectual copyright, mass production and the loss of originality are some of the techno-cultural topics under discussion. For instance, Wittkower provides a summary of the consequences arising from the use of computer expertise in photography, focused on the jurisdiction of photographic journalism (Wittkower 23-33). In stark contrast to previous methods of manually altering photos, present computer-driven photo handling is quick and seamless. In addition, Ritchin reports the factual and ethical glitches that arise out of social media sharing of photos and suggests re-describing photojournalism as editorial photography (Nelson and Garey 12). The various alterations of personal photographs are not only creating the issue of privacy intrusion, but also take further steps to damage users’ image. Traditional film photography tends to bind a photographer and a subject matter altogether and share photographs only in between the two. Unlike modern photography, anyone can alter or modify the one photograph on the web to create a totally new image. For example, various collections of “meme,” which is an inspirational quote on a photograph, on Reddit are mostly created through the third-party users. Many of these memes often have made to satirize certain situations unlike the subjects’ initial intention. There is no right to take someone’s personal property, then modify, and post it on the public place, especially when the original author does not know the alteration (Orr 2). In several communities, Facebook, with its more than 800 million users, is omnipresent (Michael et la 13). Also, social networking sites are businesses and include capitalist logics, like celebrity and self-promotion. As a result, social network users participate in self- mindful identity creation to manage impersonations, considering the virtual and real audience (Galloway and Thacker). The consequences of massive databases that consensually provide information to Facebook and Twitter with their similarly large possible audiences are noteworthy, and still emerging. While surveillance is a good starting point to think about issues of privacy and power within social networks, it does not help us to comprehend progressively, the mutual situations in which people of comparatively equal power are shriveling each other and how they use the information they gather. Whereas this activity has existed through antiquity, social media networks differ considerably from pre-digital mediated and interpersonal communication (Nelson and Garey 14). Privacy with respect to social networks is defined as freedom from unauthorized intrusion. However, what constitutes unpermitted intrusion in social networks is an open issue subject to discussions. It is important, however, to note that sharing and disclosing information on social media is completely a voluntary activity on the part of the users (DHS 15). Also, the potential surveillance can be ignored if a person decides not to upload any photograph on Facebook. Prevention is always better than treatment. In conclusion, social surveillance is the general process by which social technology users including Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook collect information about their acquaintances and friends. Individuals are regularly; constantly open to and searching for anything, they can obtain on each. Other, for anything put available out there”. The current generation is very resourceful at gathering information from different digital sources to develop a “bigger image” of social happenings. Human instincts to overhear or spy are amplified by information given or posted by those they relate with on Flickr or Twitter. Works cited Boyd, Danah. "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." Danah Boyd. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2014. Read More