7(2) 2021: Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism

Browsing 7(2) 2021: Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism by Subject "Autocratic Networked Media"

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  • Article
    Embedding Heterogenous Forms of Surveillance in China’s Autocratic Networked Media: How the Government Supports and Controls Platforms, Companies, Online Celebrities, and Users
    Bogen, Cornelia (2021) , S. 55-96
    The rise of platforms, datafication, and the new business model of platform capitalism have prompted scholars to carve out the differ- ences between surveillance capitalism in authoritarian states and Western democracies. However, there has been little research about the mechanisms that authoritarian governments use to subject eco- nomic actors and users to state control and the subsequent social practices. The case studies presented here illustrate how the state’s deep entanglement with platforms is meant to foster both economic and socio-political outcomes by allowing platforms to promote users’ entrepreneurship and restricting their online business if they are radi- cally indifferent to media content or Party censorship rules. Further- more, the case studies demonstrate that China’s model goes beyond the Western concept of surveillance capitalism, because the hetero- geneous logics of marketisation are interconnected with types of state surveillance different from the ones described by Zuboff (2019) for democratic countries. Against the backdrop of Fuchs/Trottier’s (2015) theoretical model of social media surveillance, the societal implica- tions of categorical suspicion, social sorting, and surveillance creep play out differently. The diffusion of China’s institutional setting into e-platforms provokes culture-specific narratives (Versailles literature) and social online practices utilising networked images (barrage sub- titling, human flesh search) unseen in Western online publics to date. Hence, studies of surveillance mechanisms in China’s digital space need to be embedded within the larger context of political economy and state control.