Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

By Anders Albrechtslund. First Monday, 2008

452 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful — what I call participatory surveillance.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd8a66c8c6c3ae116106fcd365b432e24ca8fca9

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In Clinical Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies; surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance (2019, background): “For this we need to be able to involve both the surveillance practices of what Lupton (2016) term imposed self-tracking, as well as what Albrechtslund (2008) term ‘participatory surveillance’.”
Social networking site or social surveillance site? Understanding the use of interpersonal electronic surveillance in romantic relationships (2011, methodology): “By using Webbased services such as SNSs, there is a presumption that people must submit to a certain level of surveillance from others (Albrechtslund, 2008).”
Learning Analytics (2013, background): “…their identities (however transient), can furthermore be a useful (and powerful) antidote to the commercialization of higher education (see, e.g., Giroux, 2003) in the context of the impact of skewed power relations, monitoring, and surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2008; Knox, 2010a, 2010b).”
“But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook (2010, background): “…protections in the T3 project The changing nature—and expectations—of privacy in online social networks are being increasingly debated and explored (see, for example, Gross and Acquisti 2005; Barnes 2006; Lenhart and Madden 2007; Nussbaum 2007; Solove 2007; Albrechtslund 2008; Grimmelmann 2009).”
Quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking using apps (2015, background): “What has been described as ‘participatory surveillance’ (Albrechtslund 2008; Best 2010, 7) involves the voluntary turn of the gaze upon oneself for one’s own purposes.”