Communication and Media
The contemporary epoch is characterized by the augmenting technological advancement propelled by the mainspring of the internet. The advancements have been coupled with labyrinthine drawbacks. Daily transactions that happen instantly in a multitude of systems and machinery, human-driven, or Internet of Things has led to the emergence of Big Data. The collection of data can be harnessed to provide insight and model future events and trends. Social Media platforms have redefined human interactions allowing communication over a large geographical separation. Antonio Gramsci, a communist thinker in Italy, sheds new light on the perspective of hegemony. Hegemony refers to a control mechanism initiated through a societal superstructure through which a dominant class established a set of rules enforced to the subordinate groups. The availability of various tools for appraisal of data and the techniques of data-analytic have rendered data as a trade item. Social platforms such as Facebook, extract information from users based on their online activities and profiles them and selling data to an organization with certain interests, providing for a room for manipulation and individualized targets.
Gramsci classified the superstructure into civil society and the State. Civil society encompasses institutions such as churches, schools, or trade unions. Gramsci illustrates that civil society provides a convention for class domination while the State provided the direct chain of command. Social hegemony refers to consent bestowed by the bulk of the population to the direction dictated by the dominant fundamental group powered by its role in the production scale (Mayo 37). The State refers to the entity deploying coercive dynamics responsible for aligning individuals who fail to give consent with incumbent ideologies in place. The ruling class is endowed with structural supremacy over the rest of the people due to the prestige and confiture of power threshold.
The public sphere refers to the field where civic interactions and rational altercation are held. Big data and the associated analytics are tailored to perform ‘engineering of consent.’ Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are key shareholders of the online digital economy (Zuboff 13). The internet accounts for a domain that remains highly susceptible to control and regulation is executed on the minimum capacity. Digital surveillance has facilitated many opportunities for data brokers whose sole function is to exchange data for profit. Information asymmetry is the situation where the organization and the pertinent affiliation contain data from an individual without the person being aware of the data collection taking place. These platforms are designated to monitor and subsequently manipulate masses towards a specified set of economic interests. The outcry has been raised in recent times over concerns of data privacy breaches (Deibert 30). The situation when the PRISM program spearheaded by a thread of intelligence agencies was exposed revealing email contents, document exchange, and Voice over Internet Protocol hailing from topnotch technological giants such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all compiled in the Xkeyscore system.
Information from users of social platforms is extracted willingly. There are different motivations behind technological surveillance. Surveillance has been lurking since an early age. Information profiling was not effective, and narrowing down to granular details proved elusive. Information gathered without the use of modern equipment relied on probabilistic estimation to predict the standpoint and decision making among the data-rich incumbents. Data harnessed was limited to a few sources and was vague. The sources included magazine subscription and car licensing details (Deibert 28). Targeting individuals was preposterous, and the gut feeling was common. Individuals were clustered to aggregate groups that were defined by common behavior. The data was used for marketing strategies that enabled companies to focus only on the customer base appropriate for them.
Market strategies invoke digital mediation where users generally comment and engage in discussions that direct their standings and preferences on the product, or political perspective. Data collection technical has experienced a radical shift from the traditional pull method that sought to extract information from the user directly (Andrejevic 10). New collection methodologies allow for a vast collection of information without leaving footprints bearing the harvesting invisible. Even with the brilliance of the technologies, the user-generated data is expensive and limits enterprises willing to obtain this data. The privacy policy of the social media platforms is contextualized while masquerading as freedom while allowing for modification of the user content as they deem fit. Legal standings allow for the efficacy of data trade, which conforms with the laws in place.
However, with the advent of data analytics, minute details about an individual, known as data points, are harvested based on online behavior and actions which are categorized. Data available to the users are in an ad-hoc manner and requires refining before being deployed. Behavioral science has been modified and closely researched to accurately define human behavior propagating away from the ‘rational human,’ which leads to erroneous information. Datapoints are analyzed, and the matching models are instituted that correctly predict the nature and decision-making capacity of the individual (Sevignani 85). This computational analytic allows for personalized ads to be displayed to an individual incorporating powerful, persuasive techniques aimed at changing the mindset for the individual to match up to the product needed.
The panoptic sort refers to the methodology of selecting a particular customer and endowing them with differential treatment through appealing advertising with the emphasis of coaxing them to get the product. Social control is exercised using means of digital surveillance (Andrejevic 9). Downright identification of an individual is not necessary as a layer of abstraction exists in surveillance. The control aspect is keyed in by actions garnered from surveillance on online activity are enough to create a digital alter ego replicating the original self.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides statistics indicating that close to half of the internet users are signed up for online social network service. Facebook has experienced the highest proliferation, accounting to close to one billion users. Privacy refers to the degree of control one has over the dissemination of their personal information. Facebook disregards privacy by instigating protecting models created to avoid abuse by others. Facebook and Instagram have a direct economic interest in converting user activities into monetary forms (Sevignani 93). Facebook has created engagement ads that are less conspicuous to the general population as they appear on the user’s homepage and allow for direct actions on the product’s homepage.
Data marketplace has emerged where certain bodies are allowed to convert user-data to information commodities and sell the data at exorbitant prices. Gnip is an international market center that contains user-generated content on Facebook and YouTube and allows for the fine-grain search of specific data or stream of data (Deibert 30). Data pricing is calculated according to Data Processing Units. The options for real-time feeds are available to companies.
The telecommunication sector is a major shareholder of the physical infrastructure of the demand. The human population grows exponentially, and this is followed by the need for internet access and larger bandwidth. Net neutrality is a policy that describes the transverse of information through the internet without restrictions (Sevignani 100). Telecom companies have been petitioning to be granted access control to the internet path to create a route that transfer internet packages at greater speeds while increasing cost carried forward to consumers. The organization is seeking a more diverse form of control that allows them to define the frameworks for better control of the masses.
Web commerce took hold with the launch of Mosaic. The web provides means of linking individuals and businesses to interchange trade information via a network. The business invested in e-commerce and with the presence of Big data can harness and analyses a vast amount of client data (Sevignani 100). This technique aims to yield predictions about consumer behavior and patterns and targeting these services for a revenue return.
Facebook is a giant capital-oriented organization with aims of maximizing on the accumulation of profit. Advertisement accounts for the majority of the revenue generated by the organization. The data user policy, which is the legally-binding agreement issued when signing up, is ambiguous. Facebook processes close to 2.5 billion content and close to five hundred terabytes of such data (Zuboff 11). These datasets are often needed for a set of actions and proper storage to allow for on-demand service delivery. Hadoop cluster and Map-reduce provide a convenient storage mechanism that facilitates effective data transmission.
Creation of computational analytics that is intelligent and can source meaningful data through sentiment analysis technique. This technique describes the classification of data based on keywords and gathers the words into sentence clusters, correctly predicting the view of an individual towards a post. Google and Facebook are subsidiary of the Alphabet incorporation. Google obtains 84 percent of its revenue from advertising, while Facebook obtains 98 percent. The Golden age of surveillance has been brought through the employment of tools used to track and monitor internet users to sell that information. WhatsApp is a subsidiary of Facebook and accounts for close to 75 percent of the market share in messaging (Zuboff 18). Google is extensively known as the de facto engine constituting close to 90 percent of the searches. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is penultimate after its parent company providing video hosting services. Google android lead the mobile operating system having close to 2.5 billion active Android devices.
Google and Facebook have underlying state-of-art artificial intelligence fused with powerful machine learning capabilities that can infer data narrowing it down to individuals. Google search engine stores search performed by users by keeping track of the history and metadata that comes with the phone. The rise of the Internet of Things adds prospects to surveillance-based systems with more smart homes and even cities which continuously scape data (Andrejevic 10). Facebook launched the free internet service close to sixty-five countries with intentions of bringing more people online from people in developing countries. Connecting more people provides a lucrative business projection that would enable further target specific advertising.
Project Dragonfly, a creation of Google that attempts to access the Chinese markets, failed when human rights activists and even google employees resisted this move. All this was done in an attempt to bypass the internet firewall that is set up by China to prevent data collection and data sniffing. An android phone sends close to 900 datapoints when idling in 24 hours. Facebook has liaised with other applications (Zuboff 19). Facebook and Google also collect metadata that consist of location records, email timestamps, and photos. End-to-end encryption provides a secure form of communication, as even the organization themselves cannot extract the data.
Facebook and Google have faced multiple privacy scandals about personal data privacy. In the face of such criticism, Facebook and Google have tried to amend their privacy stature. Google adds a ring of restriction to the data shared with the advertiser in the form of an ad auction platform (Sevignani 97). Google also allows the user to delete location history after three months. In July 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission charged facebook with privacy violations that led to the restructuring of Facebook policies.
In conclusion, technological advancement has led to the emergence of big data and consequently, advanced data modeling techniques. The current data analytics enables the sourcing of data from platforms and modeling the accompanying human behavior. Facebook, a social networking site, and Google, a search engine, constantly track and monitor data. User-generated content has become a trade commodity and is exchanged to organizations that are willing to pay. This provides a means of control by allowing active profiling of individuals breaching data privacy through information asymmetric. Users willingly submit data by choosing to participate in online sessions. This is regarded as giving consent for manipulation of the data by the media platforms termed in their privacy terms. Data markets have been established that authorize the selling of data by vendors. Business enterprises utilize the data through machine learning techniques and sophisticated artificial intelligence to customize ads based on consumer preferences and tastes. Facebook and Google have faced legal standings with institutions and government of privacy scandals. They have created methodologies aimed at giving consumers the freedom to control the data to be immersed in the public sphere.
Works Cited
Andrejevic, Mark. “Automating surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 17.1/2 (2019): 7-13.
Deibert, Ronald J. “The road to digital unfreedom: Three painful truths about social media.” Journal of Democracy 30.1 (2019): 25-39.
Mayo, Peter. “Gramsci, hegemony, and educational politics.” Antonio Gramsci: A pedagogy to change the world. Springer, Cham, 2017. 35-47.
Sevignani, Sebastian. “Surveillance, classification, and social inequality in informational capitalism: The relevance of exploitation in the context of markets in the information.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (2017): 77-102.
Zuboff, Shoshana. “Surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action.” New labor forum. Vol. 28. No. 1. Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, (2019):10-29