After researching the area of Digital Surveillance and Datafication I was intrigued to learn about the impacts this had on us online as a consumer. The notion of Control Society where businesses are using datafication to sort people into categories based on behavioural responses and therefore predicting human buying patterns was something that appealed to me. I am a brand strategist, marketer and content creator and for me, these tools were a game changer and I decided this would be my key focus in my podcast episode.
Falling down the rabbit hole of datafication research
The more I researched datafication and its capability of customising to meet our needs as consumers the more I became aware of just how much we had become reliant on this in our day-to-day life as consumers. Looking at the pros and cons of digital surveillance I started to see that it was very much in its early stages in establishing boundaries and informing all users of what actually happens ‘back of house’. After all, the academics only just started researching this in 2009 and fast forward to 2023 and we still didn’t fully understand where exactly our data was ending up. My challenge was staying on task and discussing the ‘thinking’ behind the argument. It would have taken several more podcast episodes to discuss the findings of datafication research.
Resolving my opinion as an advocate for digital consumerism.
I wanted my podcast to focus on this seeing both sides of the argument, however, I struggled to maintain an objective view when I loved this new way of customisation designed from the outcomes of surveillance. In the end, I wanted to draw conclusions that as a society we have reached a point of no turning back. Our fast-paced life of wanting to have it all had been designed around the outcomes of the digital consumer cycle. The more I read about just how much I was being monitored and tracked the more I realised, does the average person today stop and think about this? And when I asked my friends and family most weren’t prepared to surrender convenience for privacy and weren’t overly concerned their data was being tracked. It had become the norm of our day-to-day life.
References
Armstrong, P. (2022) “The impact of datafication on organisational culture”. Blog article.
Bauman, Z. (2000)”Liquid modernity”. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity.
Bogard, W. (2009) “Deleuze and machines: A politics of technology?” in Poster, M. and Savat, D. (eds) Deleuze and new technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 15– 31.
Savat, D. (2009) “Deleuze’s objectile: From discipline to modulation”, in Poster, M. and Savat, D. (eds) Deleuze and new technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 45– 62.
Van Dijck, J. (2014) “Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology”, Surveillance & Society, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 197-208.
White, A. (2014) “Digital Media and Society : Transforming Economics, Politics and Social Practices”, Palgrave Macmillan UK,. ProQuest Ebook
Weerkamp, W. and M. de Rijke. 2012. Activity Prediction: A Twitter-based exploration. SIGIR Workshop on Time-aware
Information Access. August 16, Portland. Available at: http://wouter.weerkamp.com/downloads/taia2012-activityprediction.
pdf (accessed May 7, 2014)
Media
Music
Intro – LifeLike by AlexiAction from Pixabay
Outro – That Ambient Science by ComaStudio from Pixabay
Images
Monitor by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay (WordPress Banner)
Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash(Sound cloud)
Research
Definitions of surveillance
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/keywordsindigitalsociology/2020/01/09/surveillance/
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH Posted 9th January 2020
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