CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance SocietyFigure 2. Internet advertising profits in the USA (Data Source: IAB Internet AdvertisingRevenue Report 2007)The implications of these observations are manifold: New media companies generateprofit by exploiting the labour of their users without paying them anything. In order torealize this profit (i.e. transforming surplus value into money capital), the collection,aggregation, assessment, and selling of data is necessary. As this collection servesinstrumental economic reasons (profit maximization, money accumulation), we canspeak of data collection that serves repressive economic goals. Therefore this is a formof economic surveillance.This chapter intended to show that there are two major influences on the character ofcontemporary surveillance society: a political and an economic one. On the one hand,new imperialism has produced a situation, in which war and terror potentially reinforceeach other, and the West reacts by increasing surveillance. This results in acontradiction between freedom and security and the short-sighted belief that moresurveillance solves societal problems. On the other hand, not only the state, but alsocorporations have an interest in gathering personal data in order to developpersonalized advertising strategies that target individual tastes and related tastes byaggregating and assessing user data.Due to the ubiquity of the interest of the state and corporations in surveillance, users ofISNS are likely to be confronted by both.33