This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my book. Basically, I want to engage in a critical analysis, as it pertains to my interest in civics and citizenship education, of some of the key scholars in a range of different fields. I will be aiming to describe their arguments, the relevance of those arguments to my work, and any differing points of view related to the work in question.
This section is on Shoshona Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Reading widely and deeply about academic topics that are part of your particular research field can be both a confronting and a humbling experience. It’s confronting because you quickly realise the level of scholarship that has taken place before, and the very little contribution that your own research might make to that mountain. And it’s humbling because you quickly come to realise how incredibly intelligent and articulate some of those previous researchers are. Such is the case with Zuboff’s work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Briefly put, Zuboff’s book describes what she classes as an entirely new form of capitalism – that is, surveillance capitalism, which is the surplus behavioural data that is gathered from our electronic devices and then sold off in behavioural data markets. This data then is either used to sell us more products, or, rather more insidiously, to ‘nudge’ our behaviour in certain ways so that we are more likely to do certain things and thus return a profit to investors who purchased that surplus data in the first place. Zuboff charts the development of this data market and the emergence of surveillance capitalism, as well as contrasting it to previous models of capitalism, such as the industrial capitalism of the early 20th century.
The part that really struck me was her analysis of the dystopian nature of technology and capitalism. I’m just old enough to remember the heady ideas of the early internet – that idea that it was a new digital frontier or digital democracy
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