Mark Andrejevic

Watching Television Without Pity The Productivity of Online Fans

Increasingly, online fan sites are providing instant feedback to television writers and scriptwriters, who are starting to pay more attention to the chatter of “the boards.” At the same time, the boards have become a marketing strategy for TV shows that takes advantage of interactivity to create fan communities and build viewer loyalty. Drawing on a case study of the popular web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com, this article explores the way in which online viewer activity doubles as a form of value-enhancing labor for television producers in two ways: by allowing fans to take on part of the work of making a show interesting for themselves and by providing instant (if not necessarily statistically representative) feedback to producers. Based on interviews with producers and contributors to a bulletin board they frequent, the article explores both sides of interactivity: the promise of shared control and the ability to off-load some market research labor onto viewers.

The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure

Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labor developed in the essay is applied to the online economy and the example of interactive TV.The analysis suggests that a critical approach to forms of surveillance facilitated by interactive media must focus on asymmetries of power and control over information technologies and resources.

Surveillance in the digital enclosure

Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of networked interactivity. This essay supplements such accounts by analyzing interactive spaces as digital enclosures which restrict access to the means of interaction to those who “freely” submit to the detailed forms of monitoring that take place within them. It supplements privacy-based critiques of surveillance with questions about the ownership and control of such data and the implications of this control for networked communication.

The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother Reality TV in the era of digital capitalism

Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time when the online economy is becoming increasingly reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The portrayal of surveillance through ‘reality TV’ as a form of entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an ‘interactive’ economy. This article relies on interviews with cast members and producers of MTV’s popular reality show ‘Road Rules’, to explore the form of subjectivity that corresponds to its implicit definition of ‘reality’. This form of subjectivity reinforces the promise of the interactive economy to democratize production by relinquishing control to consumers and viewers. Surveillance is portrayed not as a form of social control, but as the democratization of celebrity - a fact that has disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the internet’s interactive capability.

The work that affective economics does

This article focuses upon the concept of ‘affective economics’ arguing that it should be expanded to include a consideration of emerging forms of data-mining including ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘predictive analytics’. Sentiment analysis in particular seeks to manipulate consumer behaviour by gathering data about emotional responses and conducting controlled experiments on consumers. Any consideration of affective economics should include the ways in which marketers seek to manage consumers through the collection not just of demographic information, but of extensive real-time databases of their online behaviour and conversations.

The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance

After considering how surveillance practices discipline the objects of the monitoring gaze, I argue for a focus on the discipline of watching. An era of reflexive skepticism and generalized risk puts a premium on the ability to see through public façades by relying on strategies of detection and verification facilitated by interactive communication technologies that allow users to monitor one another. Interactive communication technologies allow for peer-to-peer surveillance of friends, significant others, and family members. If, in commercial and state contexts, the promise of interactivity serves as a ruse for asymmetrical and nontransparent forms of monitoring, this model of interactivity has also infiltrated the deployment of interactive technologies in personal relationships.

Defining the Sensor Society

The proliferation of embedded and distributed sensors marks the increasing passive-ication of interactivity. Devices such as smart phones, cameras, drones, and a growing array of environmental sensors (both fixed and mobile) and interactive online platforms have come to permeate daily life in technologically equipped societies. Consequently, we are witnessing a shift from targeted, purposeful, and discrete forms of information collection to always-on, ubiquitous, opportunistic ever-expanding forms of data capture. The increased use of sensors marks important changes to our understandings of surveillance, information processing, and privacy. In this article, we explore the transformations associated with the emerging sensing environment. The notion of a sensor society provides a conceptual basis for understanding the characteristics of emerging forms of monitoring and control.

Exploitation in the data mine

The Internet has been transformed in the past years from a system primarily oriented on information provision into a medium for communication and community-building. The notion of Web 2.0, social software, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have emerged in this context. With such platforms comes the massive provision and storage of personal data that are systematically evaluated, marketed, and used for targeting users with advertising. In a world of global economic competition, economic crisis, and fear of terrorism after 9/11, both corporations and state institutions have a growing interest in accessing this personal data. Here, contributors explore this changing landscape by addressing topics such as commercial data collection by advertising, consumer sites and interactive media; self-disclosure in the social web; surveillance of file-sharers; privacy in the age of the internet; civil watch-surveillance on social networking sites; and networked interactive surveillance in transnational space. This book is a result of a research action launched by the intergovernmental network COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

Introduction: Toward an analytic of governmental experiments in these times: Homeland security as the new social security

The idea for this project developed out of conversations in early 2003 between Mark and James, and gradually with and among the other contributors, about the implications of the creation of a Department of Homeland Security in the US. While our project’s title refers to the formation of this department, and while the essays in this collection more or less consider Homeland Security’s rapid emergence as a central strategy of government and as an indispensable way of modernizing and rationalizing (‘advancing’ and ‘reinventing’) liberal government in these times, our project is and is not about this institution. We have sought to assemble perspectives about the various ways that a Homeland Security developed through (re-articulating, organizing, mobilizing, and acting upon) a variety of programs oriented toward the management of risk. These programs are not always affiliated directly with the State-administrations of government, even though these ‘non-State’ programs operate by generating policy (guidelines and rules of behavior) and through techniques for calculating, recognizing, and managing risk and various other kinds of perceived/imagined problems. Some of these programs are oriented toward managing risk in the US, and others are about achieving a national security beyond the borders of the US. Some of these programs pre-date September 11, 2001 and the Bush administration, and in many respects our project is less an intervention into discussions about September 11 than an attempt to understand collaboratively the many histories that have contributed to the formation of a Homeland Security. Furthermore, a project that references Homeland Security (however indirectly) needs to acknowledge how a Homeland Security’s mission, purview, and experimentalism have changed or been revised over its short history. Mark and I have had to rethink this project in light of events surrounding the devastation and responses (or lack of responsiveness) to Hurricane Katrina and surrounding the revelation (as this introduction goes to press) that President George Bush regularly has authorized, without courtsanction and oversight, the monitoring of communication by citizens and/or residents in the US since September 11, 2001 (and this revelation following revelations about secret courts and state-approved torture justified as

Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction:

Over the past 2 years, the total amount of data about everything from the humidity of shipping crates, toilet flushes in shopping malls or tweets about Justin Beiber exceeded the total amount yet recorded in human history – equivalent to a zettabyte of data or sextillion bytes and growing (Shaw, 2014). Given this, it is now axiomatic to claim that we are in the ‘age of big data’ and are witnessing a quantitative (and perhaps qualitative) ‘revolution’ (Lohr, 2012) in human knowledge, driven by accompanying forms of data mining and analytics. New analytical methods and businesses seeking to monetize this explosion of data emerge daily. Often offered in black-boxed proprietary form, these companies and their analytic methods promise to help us gain insight into public opinion, mood, networks, behaviour patterns and relationships. Data analytics and machine learning are also ostensibly paving the way for a more intelligent Web 3.0, promising a more ‘productive and intuitive’ user/consumer experience. Data analytics involve far more than targeted advertising, however; they envision new strategies for forecasting, targeting and decision-making in a growing range of social realms, such as marketing, employment, education, health care, policing, urban planning and epidemiology. They also have the potential to usher in new, unaccountable and opaque forms of discrimination and social sorting based not on human-scale narratives but on incomprehensibly large, and continually growing, networks of interconnections.