CHRISTIAN FUCHS - ICT&S - Universität Salzburg

Christian Fuchs: Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance SocietyFigure 15. Surveillance knowledge index (one point for each correct answers to thequestions shown in figures 12-14)Table 6 shows bivariate correlations between the surveillance knowledge index andother factors. The result is that the surveillance knowledge index is significantly (at the0.01 level) negatively correlated to female gender (positively to male gender) and thewhite-collar status of a student’s father. It is significantly (at the 0.01 level) positivelycorrelated to the status of a student’s father as househusband, income, and the size ofthe location that the students have been living in for most of their lifetime. This meansthat being female decreases the possibility of high surveillance knowledge, whereasbeing a man increases it. This result could reflect dominant patriarchal values thatconstruct men as powerful, rational, and knowledgeable and women as weak,irrational, and unknowing. If the father of a student is a white-collar worker, then thelikelihood of high surveillance knowledge decreases. One reason that one can imagineis that as these fathers are all dealing with information in their jobs and work in offices,they could have a more positive attitude towards information processing and datasurveillance than most blue-collar workers because data gathering is an everydayroutine for them. It could be that a certain amount of these white-collar workers passeson their attitude towards data gathering to their kids. Another result, that might at a firstglance rather seem obscure, is that if a student’s father’s job is to be a househusband,then the likelihood that the student has higher surveillance knowledge increases.However, given the still predominant patriarchal family relations, it is clear that in mostconservative families, fathers are wageworkers and mothers either housewives orhousewives and wageworkers. Therefore it is likely that families, where fathers arehousehusbands, are more liberal families. Liberal attitudes are normally more critical ofstate interference into privacy than conservative ones. In Austria, this can be observedfor example by the fact that conservatives tend to oppose gay marriage and argue for asuperiority of heterosexual marriage that should be guaranteed by the state. Liberalfamily climates could therefore explain a certain increase of the likelihood to have high57