Complicit surveillance, interveillance, and the question of cosmopolitanism: Toward a phenomenological understanding of mediatization

Abstract

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-a-vis surveillance remains less explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro-perspectives. The same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on the cosmopolitanization process. The literature of cosmopolitanism revolves around broad cultural and ethical transformations in terms of the relationship between Self and Other, individual and humanity, and the local and the universal. Our aim in this article is to conceptualize the dynamics that yield a cosmopolitan Self and an encapsulated Self under conditions of increasingly interactive and ubiquitous forms of mediation and surveillance.

Geomedia and privacy in context. Paradoxical behavior or the unwitting sharing of geodata with digital platforms?

“…On an individual level, "new performances of self and re-inscriptions of the body in place and space" (Schwartz, Halegoua 2014, p. 1656, called the "spatial self " (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2014) arise; so too do new forms of identity-management (Saker 2016), self-surveillance, competition with others, and "watching one another", called "lateral surveillance"; (Andrejevic 2005). Individuals "[look] at [their] own content through other people's eyes" -social surveillance (Marwick, 2012), or "[control] one another" -interveillance (Jansson 2015), deined as the "social embeddedness of contemporary surveillance processes, typically governed by commercial forces, while at the same time recognizing the non-hierarchical and non-systematic nature of most social monitoring processes occurring in everyday life" (Christensen, Jansson, 2015;Jansson 2015, p. 81).…”

“…With reference to social networking sites, Debatin (2011) identiies several privacy risks that users agree to when posting on sites, and plots them in two dimensions: a horizontal axis for social interaction among users (including cyberstalking, harassment, reputation damage, but also representation through proiles), exempliied metaphorically as the visible tip of the iceberg, and a vertical axis for data collected (systematic collection, aggregation and use of data by the networking company, data miners and government agencies, third-party tracking and monitoring), represented by the much larger submerged, invisible part of the iceberg (Debatin 2011, p. 4). Several other authors have investigated that many users are not even aware of the excessive data-sharing processes and pervasive monitoring of online and mobile platforms (Christensen 2014;Christensen, Jansson 2015).…”

“I Have the Government in My Pocket…”: Social Media Users in Turkey, Transmit-Trap Dynamics, and Struggles Over Internet Freedom

“…to enable protestors to quickly mass organize, provide an alternative outlet for information and to amplify a voice for regime change and political activism” (p. 16). Yet, according to Christensen and Jansson (), the proliferation of “personalized technologies and applications” in Turkey leads to the muddling of surveillance with information collation, as well as a diffusion of surveillance practices across commercial, state, and military entities “for a variety of governmental or nongovernmental purposes.” In other words, the overall result of the growing availability and use of social media is a more seamless embedding of surveillance (and censorship) into everyday life (p. 1479). Despite the risks, socially marginalized users, particularly after the Gezi demonstrations, continue to post.…”

A Theoretical Discourse on the Mediatisation and Framing of Jos Ethno-Religious Conflicts

“…It also accounts for the current debate in which researchers have moved from analysing the mediating potentials of the media that make them channels of communication to explaining the complexities which characterize their new influential status of "a standalone institution with its own logic" (Nie, Kee, & Ahmad, 2014, p. 363). But fundamentally, there is a seeming common ground on the adoption of this concept in the purview of communication research; namely, that the media institutions and technologies exert some degree of influence on society which may be responsible for the changes that take place in the society (Christensen & Jansson, 2014;Deacon & Stanyer, 2014Falasca, 2014;Hepp, 2013;Hepp, Hjarvard, & Lundby, 2015;Hepp & Krotz, 2014;Knoblauch, 2013;Krotz, 2014;Landerer, 2013;Livingstone & Lunt, 2014;Lundby, 2014). Going further to demonstrate this consensus, Falasca (2014, p. 583), for instance, refers to mediatisation as "a process in society where media have become increasingly influential", that is, "the process of increasing dependency of society upon media and its logic" (Nie, et al, 2014, p. 363).…”

“…The disagreement is not so much routed in the lack of definition or ambiguity of definition but rather in the lack of a theoretical framework in which the two most divergent aspects of its meaning can be understood". Despite the uncertainty emerging from mediatisation discourse with scholars giving this field of research labels such as 'word/term' (Knoblauch, 2013) or 'concept' (Christensen & Jansson, 2014;Deacon & Stanyer, 2014, Falasca, 2014Falasca 2014;Nie, et al, 2014), it is introduced as a theory by Hepp et al, (2015) who argue that "the research field's understanding of mediatisation has matured, theoretically as well as empirically" (p.315). They maintain that there is a growing conceptual and empirical research which explains mediatisation processes in different aspects of life-politics, religion, culture, education, commerce, even conflicts.…”