Facebook: Surveillance and Changing Notions of Privacy in the Social Networking Era

Abstract

From the Faculty Nominator: Interpersonal forms of communication have become increasingly mediated as information technologies expand in an intimate integration with humans—a trajectory from the telegraph, telephone and then radio, television, to today’s digital media (such as Facebook). Bodies that once were involved directly (corporeally) in communication disappear, only to reappear as pixelated identities. Geographic mobility coupled with information technologies stretch social relationships in such a manner that face-to-face interaction is in general decline. As our physical presence is replaced by “data doubles” in the social network era, we expose ourselves to the unscrupulous or disingenuous panoptic gaze of corporations, advertisers, or governmental agencies. Vanessa Keen’s study of Facebook surveillance exposes the anxious and aggressive gleaning of information-rich profiles from social networking sites like Facebook. Her research reveals the risks of exposure inherent in blogging, networking, and Facebooking that may be vacuumed by prospective employers, marketers, police, and, in the age of a perpetual war on terror, intelligence agencies.