Constitutive Surveillance and Social Media

Abstract

The surveillance studies field considers its subject to be centrally important to our contemporary, technologized societies. The editors of the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies write that surveillance “has always been a component of institutional routines and human sociality, but over perhaps the past 40 years it has emerged as the dominant organising practice of late modernity” (Lyon et al. 2012, p. 1). This chapter will apply the view of surveillance as “dominant organizing practice” to social media, configuring this surveillance generally as an apparatus of Foucauldian power. Ultimately, the chapter advances a ‘constitutive’ surveillance framework as an avenue for critique, enumerating four ‘forms’ of surveillance—economic, political, lateral, and oppositional—which coalesce and conflict in the constitution of Facebook.