Digital Media Usage: Facebook and Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff

This essay delves into the realm of digital media, examining its profound impact on contemporary society. It focuses on the concept of surveillance capitalism, particularly as it relates to platforms like Facebook. The essay explores how these platforms collect and utilize user data, drawing heavily on Shoshana Zuboff's analysis. It discusses the evolution of Google's practices and the shift towards monetizing user behavior, highlighting the creation of a 'behavioral surplus' used for targeted advertising and predictive analytics. The analysis extends to how digital surveillance has become pervasive and often imperceptible, influencing various aspects of life. The paper investigates how companies like Facebook and WhatsApp leverage data for revenue generation, and the broader implications of surveillance capitalism, emphasizing its potential exploitation of human experiences and its impact on individual autonomy. The essay concludes by reflecting on the parasitic nature of surveillance capitalism and its implications for the future.

Running head: DIGITAL MEDIA USAGE
DIGITAL MEDIA USAGE
Name of the Student:
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Introduction
In the era of advanced technology, every part of human’s daily lives is associated with
the science of craft in one way or the other. There is no uncertainty that over the years,
technology has been accountable for creating exceptionally useful and effective resources
which put all the information required at the fingertips. The development of digital media has
resulted in the rise of innovative discoveries, improved facilities and has drastically changed
our daily lives (Kavenna, 2019). In media industry, WhatsApp is exceptionally renowned and
people engaged in various domains use it as a form of primary communication to reduce time
and increase efficiency. The following paper will analyse Facebook and its related
surveillance based on Shoshana Zubo concept of surveillance.
Discussion
Facebook observes and investigates usage pattern and personal data and information
uploaded as well as entered by the ones using it. It combines information regarding users
which is taken from its own website as well as other sites. On the basis of aggregation, it
distinguishes the area of interests of users known as identification. Shoshana Zuboff in the 3rd
chapter of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has restated the history of Google with focus
on the ways in which Google created a surveillance capitalism model (Zuboff, 2019).
However, a key development in that chapter noted that Google’s post-dot bomb crisis when
hungry investment dollars flooded in aiming for revenues whereas other digital businesses
collapsed. Additionally, Zuboff (2019) has claimed that Facebook faced similar kind of
surveillance issues for its unyielding pursuit of user data with more and more illicit and
destructive methods. It has been claimed that with the intention of attaining Artificial
Intelligence and algorithms, Facebook gathered information from anywhere it could.
Naughton (2019) in his report has mentioned that Zuboff has offered a new variant to
the form of capitalism which is the surveillance capitalism. It functions by offering unlimited

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access which billions of people have been willingly using and further facilitating the users of
these services to regulate the behavioural patterns of the users in distinct detail typically
without their clear agreement. The concept of surveillance one-sidedly asserts human
experiences as unrestricted raw resources for interpreting behavioural information. While
few of these information are implemented to service development, the remaining are
acknowledged as a trademarked ‘behavioural surplus’ developed into advanced production
process called the ‘machine intelligence’ and categorised into forecast services which expect
user's action in the future. Lasty, these prediction services are sold in a newly developed
marketplace which has been known as the behavioural future markets. Surveillance capitalists
have grown significantly affluent from these trading operating for several organizations that
are willing to offer risks on potential behavioural patterns.
Information technology has significantly expanded the prospects of monitoring,
gathering and analysing personal data. In the view of Evangelista (2019), the involvement of
digital technology in daily activities and social communication has facilitated these users to
become highly susceptible to regulating and forming vital sources of information about
people and groups. Digital media like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat have been
making surveillance increasingly pervasive by means of physical attainment and a
competence of accumulating substantial amounts of data (Johnson, 2019). On the other hand,
Kavenna (2019) has stated that the concept of digital surveillance can be all-pervading,
imperceptible and universal, so while some may have that anticipation while using advanced
technologies and are dynamically providing information, they frequently overlook that data
which gets continually collected about them, in more or less all façades of life. The nature of
digital surveillance expands the attainment of the panopticon which extends the visual when
users do something in public.

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Surveillance capitalism separately has claimed human experiences to be unrestricted
raw resource for interpreting into behavioural data. While, few of these data have been
applied to support service development, the rest has been accepted as proprietary behavioural
surplus (Lyon, 2017). This proprietary behavioural surplus has been linked to innovative
manufacturing procedures called machine intelligence. Surveillance capitalism on the other
hand has been introduced in 2001 with an aim of resolving financial emergency when
inexperienced organizations encountered loss of funding. As per report of Naughton (2019),
with rising investment pressure, the leaders of Google abandoned their proclaimed opposition
towards marketing. On the other hand, the company decided to increase its advertisement
funding by using exclusive accessibility to user data logs with prearranged significant
analytical understandings for creating predictions of user click-through rates considered as an
indicator of the funding of the advertisement (Evangelista, 2019).
In light of the behavioural surplus, it has been noted that Google would aim for
repurposing its increasing cache of behavioural data in order to function as a behavioural data
surplus and efficiently develop methods to aggressively obtain new sources of this surplus.
Google’s chief revenues rather depending on exclusive licensing managed web services to
portals like Yahoo! and Japan’s BIGLOBE (Zuboff, 2019). The company further produced
modest income from subsidized advertisements connected to search query keywords.
Google’s number of patents filed during the early years demonstrates the explosion of
discovery, innovation and complexity detonated by the state of exception which resulted in
important innovations and organization’s determination to develop the capture of behavioural
surplus.
Surveillance capitalism has been invented by Google over a decade ago when it
revealed that the “data exhaust” blocking its servers can be incorporated with analytics in
order to forecast of user behaviour. As per Gidaris (2019), privacy scandals in the domain of

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digital technology have been appearing with the elevating regularity in private industry as
well as in government. These rather been considered as inaccessible occurrences, have been
seen as transitory glimpses at a financial and social rationality which have surpassed the
planet while people are enjoying Gmail and Instagram. According to Lyon (2019), WhatsApp
comparatively as a young company has shown its ability of directing its data surplus into
direct predictions which developed as the foundation for remarkably profitable sales
procedure known as ‘ad targeting’. At this juncture, Orange (2019) has noted that Google,
Facebook and WhatsApp’s remarkable process has inspired several other companies in
insurance, marketing, healthcare, entertainment, education, finance, shipping and most
importantly to pursuit exceptional surveillance business income limits.
Conclusion
To conclude, digital connection has been currently viewed as means to the chief
revenues of others. However, at its foundation, surveillance capitalism has been viewed as
parasitic as well as self-referential. Such concept of surveillance has revived the
understanding of Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism as a negative factor which exploits labour,
yet foresees an unexpected turn. However, contrary to labour, concept of surveillance
capitalism has been relying on every aspect of all experiences encountered by people.

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References
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