CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society8. Implications and ConclusionsIn this section, we will discuss some political conclusions of our study. The implicationsand conclusions are organized along the five research questions that were introducedin section 6.(1) What do students consider as the greatest opportunities of ISNS?(2) What do students consider as the greatest risks of ISNS?We asked the respondents what they think the greatest advantages and disadvantages,i.e. opportunities and risks, of social networking sites were with the help of two openquestions.Maintaining existing friendships, family contacts, etc. with the help of socialnetworking sites is the most important advantage that the students in our surveymention. 59.1% of them consider it as a major advantage. 29.8% say that establishingnew contacts is very important, 19.9% mention finding and renewing old contacts andfriendships as major advantage. Maintaining existing contacts seems to be moreimportant than establishing new contacts or renewing old contacts on socialnetworking sites.55.7% of the respondents say that political, economic, or personal surveillance as aresult of data abuse, data forwarding, or a lack of data protection is a main threat ofsocial networking sites. 23.1% say it is problematic that personal affairs that shouldbetter be kept private and should not be known by others tend to become public onsocial networking sites.The data of our survey show that 59.1% consider maintaining existing contacts and29.8% establishing new contacts as major advantage of social networking sites,whereas 55.7% say that surveillance as a result of data abuse, data forwarding, or alack of data protection is a major threat of such platforms. Although students are verywell aware of the surveillance threat, they are willing to take this risk because theyconsider communicative opportunities as very important. That they expose themselvesto this risk is caused by a lack of alternative platforms that have a strongly reducedsurveillance risk and operate on a non-profit and non-commercial basis.(3) How knowledgeable are students of the rise of a surveillance society?We asked questions about the judicial situation of surveillance in Austria and Europe,including questions about the increased surveillance options available to the police dueto the amendment of the Austrian Security Police Act and the introduction of theEuropean Data Retention Directive. With the help of these questions, we calculated asurveillance knowledge index. 81.8% of the students in our survey had no or only littleknowledge about surveillance, whereas 18.3% had a good or high degree ofknowledge about surveillance. The median of the surveillance knowledge index is 1(little knowledge of surveillance). Gender, class, income, and location stratify student’sknowledge about surveillance. Being female and having a white-collar father increasethe possibility of having low surveillance knowledge, being male, higher income, andliving or coming from a larger city increases the possibility of having a high degree of99