Christian Fuchs, Associate Professor for ICTs and Society, University of Salzburg
Language: English

Social networking sites (SNS) such as MySpace, Facebook, or studiVZ are new Internet-based integrated forms of communication and community-building. It will be shown how for theorizing SNS and web 2.0, concepts such as class and exploitation can be applied. Conceiving profit-oriented commercial SNS like Facebook as exploitative class-structured spaces is a critical alternative to the predominant approach (represented by scholars such as Henry Jenkins) that describes SNS as an expression of an emerging participatory culture. Web 2.0 exploitation is based on surveillance. As SNS are huge collections of personal data, they need to be further analyzed from a surveillance studies perspective. We conducted a case study on how the topic of surveillance frames social networking site usage by students in Salzburg, Austria. Students are a primary user group of SNS. We collected answers to an online questionnaire by 674 respondents. In order to assess which role surveillance plays for students in relation to SNS, they were asked about the major perceived advantages and disadvantages of SNS. In order to assess their knowledge and awareness of surveillance, a surveillance knowledge index and a surveillance critique index were calculated. Knowledge about the SNS studiVZ as well as information behaviour on the platform were analyzed and related to the surveillance parameters. The results show that public information and discussion about surveillance and social networking platforsm is important for activating critical information behaviour. In the case of studiVZ, a change of the terms of use in 2008 that brought about the possibility of targeted personalized advertising, was the subject of public discussions that influenced students’ knowledge and information behaviour. The results show that there are no easy solutions to economic and political surveillance on SNS in an age of surveillance and new imperialism and that the topic should be analyzed critically by framing it within the context of larger societal issues.

För textunderlag samt information om MKV:s högre seminarium kontakta Sofia Johansson: sofia.johansson@sh.se