Jenkins says that he has learned from and that his analysis is now deeply informed by the criticism of Critical Studies-scholars, who stress aspects of exploitation and free labour on web 2.0, and that it is important to take these criticisms into account. He wants to stress the “expansion of participation on the one hand and the expansion of a new business model, which tries to court and capture that participation on the other”.

Jenkins says that he wants to stress both structure + agency, pleasure +exploitation, whereas Critical Studies scholars would mainly stress structure and exploitation. He says that these scholars tend to conceive users as isolated, passive consumers, whereas for him they are a networked collective close to a Habermasian public sphere.

The question is how much Jenkins has really changed his analysis and how much he has really taken into account and engaged with the arguments of Critical Studies?

Jenkins simply constructs a dualistic “both…and”-argument based on the logic: “Web 2.0 is both …. and … ”: both pleasure and exploitation, both a space of participation and a space of commodification. He wants to focus on the aspects of pleasure and creativity and wants to leave the topic of exploitation to others and does thereby not grasp the dialectics at work and the relations of dominance we find on web 2.0. The question is not only what phenomena we find on social media, but how they are related and to which extent and degree they are present. There is no doubt that web 2.0 users are creative when they generate and diffuse user-generated content. But the question is also how many web 2.0 are active and which degree of activity and creativity their practices have. So for example in Sweden, one of the world’s most advanced information societies, only 6% of the population have their own blog, only 8% of all Internet users blog occasionally,  and only 16% of all Internet users upload video clips occasionally (Findahl 2010). Cultural Studies Scholars like Jenkins tend to overstate the creativity and activity of users on the web. Creativity is a force that enables Internet prosumer commodification, the commodification and exploitation of the users’ activities and the data they generate. Creativity is not outside of or dual to exploitation on web 2.0, it is its very foundation.

Another problem I have with Jenkins’ work is his use of the notion of participation. He has defined and continues to define a “participatory culture” as a culture:
“1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4.Where members believe that their contributions matter
5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)“ (Jenkins 2006, 7).
Jenkins has argued that increasingly “the Web has become a site of consumer participation” (Jenkins 2008, 137) and his ICA talk confirms that he holds on to this assumption and understanding of participation.

The problem with concepts like “participatory culture” is that participation is a political science term that is strongly connected to participatory democracy theory and authors like Crawford Macpherson and Carole Pateman. I have in contrast to Jenkins and others argued against a vulgar use of the term participation and stressed that Internet Studies should relate the usage of the term to participatory democracy theory, in which it has the following dimensions (Fuchs 2011, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies, Chapter 7: Participatory web 2.0 as ideology; Fuchs 2008, Internet and Society):

(1) The intensification and extension of democracy as grassroots democracy to all realms of society
(2) The maximization of human capacities (Macpherson: human developmental powers) so that humans become well-rounded individuals
(3) Extractive power as impediment for participatory democracy:
Macpherson (1973) argues that capitalism is based on an exploitation of human powers that limits the development of human capacities. The modern economy “by its very nature compels a continual net transfer of part of the power of some men to others [for the benefit and the enjoyment of the others], thus diminishing rather than maximizing the equal individual freedom to use and develop one’s natural capacities” (Macpherson 1973, 10f).
(4) Participatory decision-making
(5) Participatory economy
A participatory economy requires a “change in the terms of access to capital in the direction of more nearly equal access” (Macpherson 1973, 71) and “a change to more nearly equal access to the means of labour” (73). In a participatory society, extractive power is reduced to zero (74). A democratic economy involves “the democratising of industrial authority structures, abolishing the permanent distinction between ‘managers’ and ‘men’” (Pateman 1970, 43).
(6) Technological productivity as material foundation of participatory democracy
(7) Participation as education in participation
(8) Pseudo-participation as ideology.
The problem is that for Jenkins participation means that humans meet on the net, form collectives, create and share content, etc. He has a culturalistic understanding of participation and ignores the notion of participatory democracy, a term which has political, political economic and cultural dimensions. Jenkins’ definition and use of the term “participatory culture“ ignores aspects of participatory democracy, it ignores questions about ownership of platforms/companies, collective decision-making, profit, class and the distribution of material benefits. The cultural expressions of Internet users are strongly mediated by the corporate platforms owned by Facebook, Google and other large companies. Neither the users nor the waged employees of Facebook, Google & Co. determine the business decisions of these companies, they do not “participate” in economic decision-making, but are excluded from it.
Internet culture is not separate from political economy, but is to a large extent organized, controlled and owned by companies (platforms like Wikipedia are non-corporate models that are different from the dominant corporate social media model). Social media culture is a culture industry. Jenkins’ notion of “participatory culture” is about expressions, engagement, creation, sharing, experience, contributions and feelings and not also about how these practices are enabled by and antagonistically entangled into capital accumulation. Jenkins has a reductionistic understanding of culture that ignores contemporary culture’s political economy. Furthermore he reduces the notion of participation to a cultural dimension, ignoring the broad notion of participatory democracy and its implications for the Internet. An Internet that is dominated by corporations that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users can in the theory of participatory democracy never be participatory and the cultural expressions on it cannot be an expression of participation.

The most popular YouTube videos stem from global multimedia corporations like Universal, Sony and Walt Disney. Google and Facebook are based on targeted advertising models and a commercial culture, which results in huge profits for these companies. Politics on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are possible, but are minority issues – the predominant focus of users is on non-political entertainment. Web 2.0 corporations and the usage they enable are not an expression of participatory democracy. As long as corporations dominate the Internet, it will not be participatory. The participatory Internet can only be found in those areas that resist corporate domination and where activists and users engage in building and reproducing non-commercial, non-profit Internet projects like Wikipedia or Diaspora. Jenkins (and many others) continuously ignore questions of who owns, controls and materially benefits from corporate social media.

Jenkins says that social media users are like a Habermasian public sphere. One wonders if he has ever read “Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit” (Habermas 1962/1991), the book, in which Habermas stresses that the bourgeois public sphere has created its own limits and thereby its own immanent critique by a) limiting the freedom of speech and public opinion in those cases, where persons who do not have the same formal education and material resources for participating in the public spheres are facing unequal conditions of participation and exclusion (Habermas 1962/1991, 227) and by b) limiting the freedom of association and assembly in those cases, where big economic and political organizations dominate the public sphere (Habermas 1962/1991, 228). In the corporate social media sphere, attention is unequally distributed, big companies, celebrities and well-known political actors enjoy attention advantages and the most active prosumers come from the young, educated middle-class. Is this a Habermasian public sphere? No. Corporate social media are an expression of the limits of the bourgeois public sphere that Habermas has pointed out.

Jenkins says that now in contrast to his earlier works he has engaged with the arguments of Critical Studies scholars. But one wonders when listening to him misnaming Hans Magnus Enzensberger “Hans Mangus Eisensberger” and Mark Andrejevic “Michael Andrejevic”, if he really has engaged with Critical Studies. He furthermore attributes the quotation from Enzensberger that he uses (without giving page numbers, source and publication year; a practice he uses for all quotations in his presentation) to the 1960s, whereas Enzensberger published the work, from which the quotation stems (“Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien”, Enzensberger 1970) in 1970. In it, Enzensberger not only talked about “emancipatory media usage”, but distinguished this concept from “repressive media use” and made clear, in contrast to Jenkins, that emancipatory media negate and aim at the emancipation of the media landscape from capitalism. In contrast to Enzensberger, corporatism and participation are in Jenkins’ view co-existent in the media landscape.

One is surprised that when Jenkins talks about media and politics that he does not talk about how the contemporary new student rebellions that resist the hyperneoliberal attack on higher education make use of social media, what the role of the media and social media has been in protests like in Madison, Spain, or Greece and in the rebellions and revolutions in Northern African countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, or Libya. There is also no discussion of WikiLeaks, the most important online medium talked about in 2010. Instead, what are the “political” examples of struggles that Jenkins comes up with like? The prototypical example he gives is that 400 fans demonstrated the power of consumption when they “resisted” the planned ending of the NBC programme “Chuck” by buying (“buycott”) “foot long sandwiches” at Subway as a sign of “protest”. What does it tell us if a leading scholar simply ignores discussing the role of the media in political rebellions, protests and revolutions and instead focuses on the old Cultural Studies hobbyhorse of the rebelling TV audience that is constantly “resisting” in order to consume ever more?

Media and Communication Studies should forget about the vulgar and reductionistic notion of participation (simply meaning that users create, curate, circulate or critique content) and focus on rediscovering the political notion of participation by engaging with participatory democracy theory. There was a time, when Cultural Studies scholars were claiming about others that they are economic reductionists. Today, it has become overtly clear – and Jenkins’ work is  the best expression of this circumstance – that cultural reductionism has gone too far, that the cultural turn away from Critical Political Economy was an error and that Media and Communication Studies needs to rediscover concepts like class and participatory democracy.

References

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1970. Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien. Kursbuch 20: 159-186.

Findahl, Olle. 2010. Swedes and the Internet. Stockholm: .SE.

Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and society. Social theory in the information age. New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, Christian. 2011. Foundations of critical media and information studies. New York: Routledge.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1962/1991. The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jenkins, Henry et al. 2006. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture. Chicago, IL: MacArthur Foundation.

Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence culture. New York: New York University Press.

Macpherson, Crawford Brough. 1973. Democratic theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and democratic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The programme can be heard here.

Vol. 8. No. 2: Special Issue on Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture
Edited by Christian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken, Marcus Breen
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/current

Suggested citation: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen. Eds. 2010. Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“. tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 8 (2): 193-309.

“Capitalism […] is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (Slavoj Žižek).

What is the role of communication in the general situation of capitalist crisis?
The global economic downturn is an indicator of a new worldwide capitalist crisis. The main focus of most public debates as well as of economic and policy analyses is the role of finance capital and the housing market in creating the crisis, less attention is given to the role of communication technologies, the media, and culture in the world economic crisis. The task of this special issue of tripleC is to present analyses of the role of ICTs, the media, and culture in the current crisis of capitalism. The seven papers focus on the causes, development, and effects of the crisis. Each paper relates one or more of these dimensions to ICTs, the media, or culture.

Capitalist Crisis, Communication, & Culture – Introduction to the Special Issue of tripleC
Christian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus
Breen (Special Issue Editors)
pp 193-204
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/228/189

Computing and the Current Crisis:
The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in Our Socio-Economic Meltdown
David Hakken
pp 205-220
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/161/193

The Virtual Debt Factory: Towards an Analysis of Debt and Abstraction in the American Credit Crisis
Vincent R. Manzerolle
pp 221-236
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/149/192

Calculating the Unknown. Rationalities of Operational Risk in Financial Institutions
Matthias Werner and Hajo Greif
pp 237-250
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/184/194

Crisis, What Crisis? The Media: Business and Journalism in Times of Crisis
Rosario de Mateo, Laura Bergés, Anna Garnatxe*
pp 251-274
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/212/195

Anglo-American Credit Scoring and Consumer Debt in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2007 as Models for Other Countries?
Thomas Ruddy
pp 275-284
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/176/198

Crise, Genre et TIC : Recette pour une Dés-Union Pronon- cée. L’Exemple de l’Afrique du Sud
(in French)
Joelle Palmieri
pp 285-309
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/141/197

WikiLeaks is a non-commercial Internet whistle-blowing platform that is online since 2006. It was founded by Julian Assange and is funded by online donations. Whistleblowers can upload documents that are intended to make misbehaviour and crimes of governments and corporations transparent, i.e. visible in the public. One can upload such documents anonymously by making use of an online submission form. WikiLeaks’s main servers are based in Sweden.

The power elite – large corporations, governments, and military institutions –distinguishes itself from ordinary citizens and most civil society organizations by two features: these actors have a lot of economic and political power, which allows them to strongly shape our world. They also have the resources to keep parts of their activities invisible. Therefore for example corporate crime frequently remains undetected. The topic that made the news about WikiLeaks in late July 2010 was that the platform published more than 90 000 top-secret documents (reports of soldiers about operations, protocols of surveillance operations, etc) from American military sources about military operations in Afghanistan.

According to news sources (Der Spiegel, 30/2010, pp. 70-86), the documents:

- show that and how special command forces like the US Task Force 373 have killed enemies that are defined on death lists
- document failed operations (including death of civilians)
- document that the Americans and their allies are facing serious problems in the military conflict with the Taliban and Al Qaeda
- document that unmanned fighter drones used in Afghanistan are error prone and have had many accidents

Following the leak of the Afghanistan documents, US government representatives and conservative commentators heavily criticized WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. US National Security Adviser General James Jones said that WikiLeaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security”. Mike Millen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family”. Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, argued in the Washington Post that WikiLeaks “is a criminal enterprise”, constitutes “material support for terrorism”, and that the “Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents – and its leadership brought to justice” .

Such statements are strongly twisting reality. They are ideology at its purest. War is always about killing the enemy. In Afghanistan, US soldiers and their allies kill military enemies and, as is known not only since the WikiLeaks documents, this has also resulted in numerous civilian casualties, and Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters kill US and allied soldiers as well as Afghan civilians by suicide attacks. This double-sided violence has created a spiral of attacks and counter-attacks that sadly has caused many casualties. Violence is not caused by the materials published by WikiLeaks that document violence, it is caused by the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves. One gets the impression that the US government thinks that military violence does not exist if it is unknown. One is reminded here of the US coverage of anti-Iraq war protests in many US mainstream media, where the protesters were described with terms such as anarchists, violent mob, vandals, rioters, mayhem, chaos, aggressive, etc and the impression was invoked that the main violent problem is not the war itself, but those protesting against the war.

The truth about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents is that the platform has the potential to make visible the scale of brutality, violence, and horror of warfare and military conflicts. To uncover and document such realities is uncomfortable for those powerful actors, who want to twist reality by making what really happened in the daily reality of war, corporate crime, and corporate and government corruption unknown. WikiLeaks is a project that makes unknown reality known, it transforms that which is kept secret and invisible by governments and corporations into visible reality.  WikiLeaks can be seen as an alternative media project: it tries to provide information that uncovers the misuse of power by powerful actors, it is an Internet-based medium that enables critiques of power structures.

Power is based on a dialectic of visibility and invisibility: powerful actors want to make their enemies and opponents visible, while they want to remain themselves invisible. They engage in surveillance in order to make visible and in order to keep their own operations and gathered information invisible. Power is always related to making information about enemies and opponents visible, while at the same time making and keeping the collected information intransparent, inaccessible, and secret. WikiLeaks cuts into the power dialectic of visibility of the surveilled and invisibility of the powerful by helping to make invisible power structures visible. This is itself a process of power-making and power-generation because these are processes that try to force visibility on the powerful. WikiLeaks engages in watching the powerful by making their operations and the information gathered by surveillance operations of the powerful visible. During the Vietnam war, television made visible the horror of the killing fields that would have otherwise remained invisible. In a similar fashion, WikiLeaks has made visible hidden and secret realities of warfare today.

WikiLeaks is not politically value-free and neutral in its operations, but no journalist and no medium is neutral, but rather always politically biased because how things are reported, what is not reported, which priority is given to certain stories, which quotation by which person is mentioned first in a story, how often a certain opinion is mentioned in a story, how advertising and funding influences the basic framework of a medium, etc are all political biases. Therefore the publication of the Afghanistan documents on WikiLeaks is certainly a political move intended to help putting and end to the war in Afghanistan. It is political in the same sense that any news article and any TV news report about the Afghan report carries political messages, interests, and intentions. It is politically honest when Julian Assange talks openly about his anti-war motivations in an interview with Der Spiegel: “This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence. […] There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won’t do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner. […] The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped”. Political honesty is a virtue that many politicians and newsmakers are all too often missing.

Of course it could happen that WikiLeaks publishes fake material. But this can happen and does happen in any mass medium. There are no reasons to assume that it should happen more often on WikiLeaks than in corporate mass media. To the contrary, WikiLeaks does not have the advertising and financial pressure characteristic for the corporate mass media that Chomsky and Herman have characterized as propagandistic filters that distort news reporting. Therefore one should be less concerned about manipulated information on WikiLeaks than one should be concerned about media manipulation in the corporate mass media.

WikiLeaks defines itself in its self-description first of all as a liberal project that protects freedom of speech and tries to strengthen democracy by making government corruption visible: “WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. […] We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly – in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances – the internet, and cryptography – the risks of conveying important information can be lowered. […] We believe that it is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government. That is why the time has come for an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem of the WikiLeak self-description is that in the first third of the text, only documenting government corruption is mentioned, whereas documenting corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes is not. This creates the impression that corrupt governments are the main problem of our world, but not also or not even more corrupt and criminal corporations. The document in its first third conveys a liberal impression that talks about the problems of big government and at the same time – or even by doing so – ignores the problems of capitalism. Fortunately the self-description then takes a twist in a section titled “Does WikiLeaks support corporate whistleblowers?”, where the need for documenting corporate crimes and corporate irresponsibility is discussed:

“It is increasingly obvious that corporate fraud must be effectively addressed. Corporate corruption comes in many forms. […] The number of employees and turnover of some corporations exceeds the population and GDP of some nation states. When comparing countries, after observations of population size and GDP, it is usual to compare the system of government, the major power groupings and the civic freedoms available to their populations. Such comparisons can also be illuminating in the case of corporations. […] While having a GDP and population comparable to Belgium, Denmark or New Zealand, many of these multi-national corporations have nothing like their quality of civic freedoms and protections. This is even more striking when the regional civic laws the company operates under are weak (such as in West Papua, many African states or even South Korea); there, the character of these corporate tyrannies is unobscured by their civilizing surroundings. Through governmental corruption, political influence, or manipulation of the judicial system, abusive corporations are able to gain control over the defining element of government — the sole right to deploy coercive force” (WikiLeaks self-description).

So WikiLeaks fortunately finally makes clear that it explicitly is not only a government watchdog, but also a corporate watchdog. But the first time that corporations are mentioned at all and at the same time mentioned as governments comes relatively late in the document, namely in the passage which says that the “power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem that remains is that in the WikiLeaks self-description, corporate crimes and corporate corruption are only mentioned late, whereas government power is mentioned in the second paragraph. Another problem is the assumption that it is possible to civilize corporations:

“WikiLeaks endeavors to civilize corporations by exposing uncivil plans and behavior. Just like a country, a corrupt or unethical corporation is a menace to all inside and outside it” (WikiLeaks self-description). One can hear daily stories about corporate irresponsibility: stories such as the one that British Petrol caused one of the worst ecological disasters are in all news, that iPods and iPads are produced in China under inhumane conditions by workers who commit suicide because they cannot stand the working conditions, etc cannot be overheard in the media, there are daily stories about child labour, precarious labour conditions, etc. The problem is that such a multitude of stories, and WikiLeaks here is no exception and directly admits this in its self-description, makes us believe that corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes against humanity are the exception from the rule and can therefore be fixed within capitalism by “civilizing corporations”. But what if corporations are uncivilized as such, if their behaviour is always exploitative and irresponsible? Then capitalism and corporations cannot be civilized, and exposing uncivil plans and behaviour should be aimed at transforming and civilizing the whole.

I applaud the critical political potential of WikiLeaks as corporate and government-Internet watchdog, but think that WikiLeaks’s self-description and self-understanding should be changed as soon as possible.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quoted saying: “The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people – and it runs into all these privacy concerns”. He acknowledges that some people have “the vision of a surveillance world”. But he associates Google, not Facebook with surveillance. He says that Google’s strategy of data collection “is a little scary” and thinks that Facebook in contrast gives users control over their data. “Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system”.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he does not care about profit, but wants to help people with Facebook’s tools and wants to create an open society. Kevin Colleran, Facebook advertising sale executive, says in the Wired story that “Mark is not motivated by money”. In a story by the Times (October 20, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article4974197.ece), Zuckerberg said: “The goal of the company is to help people to share more in order to make the world more open and to help promote understanding between people. The long-term belief is that if we can succeed in this mission then we also be able to build a pretty good business and everyone can be financially rewarded. […] The Times: Does money motivate you. Zuckerberg: No”.

Zuckerberg thinks that the only problem about Facebook surveillance is that other individuals get access to images or information of users that is not meant for being available to them. He also thinks that privacy control options will solve this problem. Facebook has tended to make ever more information available to all users as its standard setting. One cannot assume that all users are highly skilful in setting their privacy options. Zuckerberg ignores the skills divide in social networking site usage.

But the more crucial problem is that Zuckerberg fully ignores the economic power structures of the modern economy, into which Facebook is embedded. If Zuckerberg really does not care about profit, why is Facebook then not a non-commercial platform and why does it use targeted advertising? The problems of targeted advertising are that it aims at controlling and manipulating human needs, that users are normally not asked if they agree to the use of advertising on the Internet, but have to agree to advertising if they want to use commercial platforms (lack of democracy), that advertising can increase market concentration, that it is intransparent for most users what kind of information about them is used for advertising purposes, and that users are not paid for the value creation they engage in when using commercial web 2.0 platforms and uploading data. Surveillance on Facebook is not only an interpersonal process, where users view data about other individuals that might benefit or harm the latter, it is primarily economic surveillance, i.e. the collection, storage, assessment, and commodification of personal data, usage behaviour, and user-generated data for economic purposes. Facebook and other web 2.0 platforms are large advertising-based capital accumulation machines that achieve their economic aims by economic surveillance.

Facebook collects information about user behaviour on other sites for economic purposes: “We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as ‘conversion tracking,’ helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see. We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads“ (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Facebook targets advertisement to individual users by surveilling their usage behaviour and interests: “We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. […] We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your friends to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. For example, if you connect with your favorite band’s page, we may display your name and profile photo next to an advertisement for that page that is displayed to your friends. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the friend who can see the ad. You can opt out of having your information used in social ads on this help page” (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Zuckerberg and Facebook ignore concerns about advertising settings. Facebook’s privacy policy is the living proof that Facebook is primarily about profit-generation by advertising. “The world will be better if you share more“? For whom, Mark Zuckerberg? “Sharing” on Facebook in economic terms means primarily that Facebook “shares” information with advertising clients. And “sharing” is only the euphemism for selling and commodifying data. Facebook commodifies and trades user data and user behaviour data. Facebook does not make the world a better place, it makes the world a more commercialized place, a big shopping mall without exit. It makes the world only a better place for companies interested in advertising, not for users.

Mr. Zuckerberg, if you are a man who stands by his word, and Facebook for you is really not about profit, then please abolish targeted advertising and any kind of advertising on Facebook tomorrow and transform Facebook into a non-commercial, non-profit Internet platform. Yours truly, Christian Fuchs.

Google does not give a viable explanation why it collected data from WiFi networks. The company wrote on its blog: “So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software – although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Is it reasonable to assume that a software code that collects private data is accidently installed and nobody knows about it? Can this statement be trusted if it comes from a company that naturally has an economic interest in turning data into profit?

The collected data enables Google to link certain images, videos, some details about private lives, work and business, and personal documents to addresses. No matter if Google uses these data for economic purposes, statistical analysis, or does not use them, the question is if citizens can feel save when a corporation that by its own nature has capital accumulation as its highest priority (which does in reality frequently conflict with citizens’ interests), collects and controls such data without the knowledge and agreement of users. Google says that it has or will delete all collected data. But if this is indeed true, cannot be controlled. Even if public prosecution authorities and data protection agencies gain access to Google hard disks that contain these data, it cannot be guaranteed that data copies have not been made. Once data is collected and controlled by one actor, it can be easily, cheaply and very quickly copied. This means that one cannot trust Google’s assertions that it has or will delete the data because there can never be certainty about the deletion of digital data. Damage has already been irreversibly caused at the moment the data were collected because of the very nature of digitalization that allows the creation of an endless number of exact data doubles.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Google’s naïve apology is not worth a tinker’s cuss because the affected users can never be sure what exactly has happened or will happen to their data and if this will have negative consequences for them.

The incident shows that Google has an interest in obtaining as much data about users as possible and that it does not shy away from collecting data without the knowledge and consent of users and even from private networks.

“This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today” (Official Google Blog, May 14^th, 2010). Because a network is open does not mean that companies should be allowed to download data from the network and that users welcome them to do so. Some observers argue that if someone leaves a wireless network open/unprotected, it is his/her own fault if others extract data from it. They also say that leaving a wireless network open is like writing a postcard or not sealing a letter, which invites others to read. Why is this analogy inappropriate? Open wireless networks advance free access and the sharing of data, which in turn fosters human communication, which is a basic human need that should not cost money. Therefore open networks as such are desirable. If all providers close their wireless networks off from the public, costless public access to information and communication over the Internet is disabled and industry interests in charging users for Internet access is advanced. Therefore there are good reasons for providing open access to wireless networks. Other reasons for not protecting wireless networks are that people want to share data with people in their flat, their house, or their block, which does not mean that they want to share it with Google. Also some users might not know or not be sure which data on their computers and networks is available to others. If you do not lock your door because you want your friends who live next door to be able to enter any time, then this does not mean that you welcome strangers to come in and take pictures of you sleeping, having sex, sitting on the toilet, lying in the bathtub, or conducting other activities.

I am sure that most Internet users have found it useful to browse streets on Google Street View before going to a place they have never been to in order to easier orient themselves and gain an idea of how the place they are going to looks like. This shows the power of contemporary Internet technologies to serve basic human needs such as communication, co-ordination, and orientation. But at the same times these technologies under the control of profit-oriented firms serve economic interests that conflict with basic human interests. Google has a contradictory nature: it advances human sociability and communication and at the same time threatens data protection due to its profit-oriented character. There is an antagonism between the productive power of Internet technologies and the capitalist relations that shape the production and usage of these technologies.

The German consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner has enforced that Google must garble private houses and gardens on Google Street View if citizens formally object. This debate is itself contradictory: if all houses are gabled on Google Street View, then users will get no impression of how a certain ward they want to go to looks like; if all houses are visible, certain people might feel that criminal acts and acts of terrorism are easier to plan.

In Germany, the Hamburg public prosecution authority started investigations against Google because of the suspicion that the company intercepted data. In Austria, the Data Protection Commission banned further data collection by Google Street View at the end of May 2010. Josef Ostermayer, who is Austrian State Secretary for the Media, wants to criminalize illegal data collection (Der Standard, May 28, 2010). Currently, unauthorized data collection is only illegal if the data are purposefully collected and valorized for economic purposes. Ostermayer wants to criminalize unauthorized data collection so that not only the use of such data for profit-purposes is illegal, but already the gathering process itself. He also suggests that there should not only be a national law, but that the EU Data Protection Directive is amended (Der Standard, May 28, 2010).

The best reaction to surveillance by private companies, as in the case of Google, is to let them feel the full violence of democratic law enforcement. Therefore the current developments in Austrian and Germany of taking legal measures against Google are more than appropriate. Corporations may not be very willing to voluntarily respect the consumer interest in data protection, but they may become more responsive if corporate data misuse is criminalized, severely punished, and causes painful financial losses for them. The Google Street View incident shows that companies do not automatically see privacy violation as a mistake and that legal measures that make companies like Google and Facebook learn privacy lessons are very much needed. Maybe it is time to stop talking about corporate social responsibility and to start focusing on the analysis, exposure, and investigation of corporate social irresponsibility.

Liberal Democrats: No agenda is also an agenda

The Liberal Democrats do not have an agenda for the role they want to assign to ICTs and the Internet in Britain. In their “Liberal Democrat Manifesto 2010”, the prospects for the economy are fully focused on establishing a Green economy. There is no discussion of the role of ICTs and the Internet in the economy. One finds a few passages in the 109 pages of the document, where ICTs or the Internet are mentioned: The LibDems seem to consider social networking sites and web 2.0 primarily as problem, where users become victims of individual crimes. Therefore they want to tackle ”online bullying by backing quick-report buttons on social networking sites, enabling offensive postings to be speedily removed“ (p. 17). They do not discuss the problem of online commodification of users and the circumstance that the Internet is dominated by a commercial, advertising-oriented culture that results in data surveillance for economic purposes. Discussions about the online bullying report button ignore the positive aspects that web 2.0 has for the socialization and growing-up process of adolescents. The LibDems want to advance “better government IT procurement, investigating the potential of different approaches such as cloud computing and open-source software“ (p. 17) and  “support public investment in the roll-out of superfast broadband, targeted first at those areas which are least likely to be provided for by the market“ (p. 26). They do not argue what kind of broadband Internet they want to provide, if it should be freely available to all citizens or if it fit should be a manifestation of an intensified commodification of the Internet so that users have to pay private companies for getting access to a broadband Internet that is dominated by commercial culture. The message that the Liberal Democrat’s manifesto gives is that they have no clue about what role the Internet and ICTs should play in society. Having no ICT and Internet agenda is also an agenda, although not a particularly good one. So what about the Conservatives and the Labour Party? Can they make a difference in ICT and Internet politics?

Conservative Party and Labour Party

Other than the Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party in their 120-page Conservative Manifesto 2010 and the Labour Party in their 78-page Labour Party Manifesto 2010 give significant attention to the role of ICTs and the Internet in British society. The Tories have even published a 9 page “Conservative Technology Manifesto” for the 2010 elections. But an analysis of these manifestos shows that large quantity does not necessarily mean good quality.

Both the Conservatives and Labour want to advance the rollout of a super-fast Internet broadband infrastructure. They want to invest public money in building this infrastructure and leave no doubt that private companies should control it. “We want Britain to become a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries – but this can only happen if we have the right infrastructure in place. Establishing a super-fast broadband network throughout the UK could generate 600,000 additional jobs and add £18 billion to Britain’s GDP“ (Conservative Manifesto 2010, p. 24). “Our plans will give Britain the fastest high speed broadband network in Europe, helping to create 600,000 additional jobs. We will make the British government the most technology-friendly in the world, and meet our ambition that the next generation of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies“ (Conservative Technology Manifesto, p. 2). “We will be the first country in Europe to extend superfast 100 mbps broadband across most of the population. This is up to 50 times faster than Labour’s planned broadband network – and will open up new opportunities for the next generation of British high tech companies, and put Britain at an advantage when it comes to developing innovative online platforms and services. We will unleash private sector investment to build this superfast broadband network by opening up network infrastructure, easing planning rules and boosting competition“ (p. 6).

The Labour Party also wants to advance a high-speed Internet broadband infrastructure. It speaks of “Broadband Britain“: “Britain must be a world leader in the development of broadband. We are investing in the most ambitious plan of any industrialised country to ensure a digital Britain for all, extending access to every home and business. We will reach the long-term vision of superfast broadband for all through a public-private partnership in three stages: first, giving virtually every household in the country a broadband service of at least two megabits per second by 2012; second, making possible superfast broadband for the vast majority of Britain  in partnership with private operators, with Government investing over £1 billion in the next seven years; and lastly reaching the final ten per cent using satellites and mobile broadband. Because we are determined that every family and business, not just some, should benefit, we will raise revenue to pay for this from a modest levy on fixed telephone lines. And we will continue to work with business, the BBC and other broadcasting providers to increase take-up of broadband and to ensure Britain becomes a leading digital economy” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, pp. 1:7f).

Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party leave no doubt that they want to invest taxpayer’s money for creating a high-speed broadband infrastructure that is controlled by private companies and that can be accessed by people in the UK by paying fees to Internet service provider companies. This means that public investment is used not for creating a public infrastructure that is universally accessible, which means accessible for all without payment, but for privatizing the infrastructure so that is in the hands of companies and thereby de-facto becomes commodified and private property. If access to knowledge, knowledge production, and communication are universal conditions of human and societal flourishing, then Internet access – a central infrastructure for contemporary information, communication, and co-operation – should be treated as being part of the commons of society and should be made available without payment to all citizens. A commodified Internet infrastructure privileges high-income classes, stratifies Internet access, as a tendency excludes lower-income groups, and commodifies the access to knowledge and communication.

The Conservatives do not think about Internet access solutions beyond the market, whereas the Labour Party suggests to “build on our network of UK Online centres and public libraries to spread free internet access points within the community, and develop new incentives for users to switch to online services“ (Labour Party Manifesto, p. 9:5). Free Internet access within libraries is a strange idea, it is like not being able to take home a book from the library, but having to read the full book in the library. The Internet is a highly flexible and mobile technology, containing access to certain places, such as libraries, is therefore an odd and backward-oriented policy suggestion. The only viable solution is to create freely available, non-commercial wireless Internet access points all over the country.

What kind of Internet content and platform providers do the Tories and Labour favour? Both parties claim that they will advance economic growth by fostering entrepreneurship in the ICT industry and providing tax cuts and start-up subsidies for ICT and Internet companies. “A Conservative government will build a new model of economic growth, based on high tech and high value industries. This means harnessing and catalysing the next generation of technologies, and helping businesses to create highly paid new jobs in every part of the country. We will build a high tech 21st century infrastructure that is fit for purpose, and we will lay the foundation for a British technology revolution” (Conservative Technology Manifesto 2010, p. 6). “As recommended by the Dyson Review, we will keep R&D tax credits but will simplify and refocus them on high tech companies, small businesses and new start-ups in order to stimulate a new wave of technology” (Conservative Technology Manifesto 2010, p. 7).

Similar policies are envisioned by Labour: “Labour believes we should rebuild our economy in new ways: with more high-tech business, fairer rewards and responsibility from all, including at the top” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 0:4). “Within this, the Growth Capital Fund will focus on SMEs which need capital injections of between £2 and £10 million, while the Innovation Investment Fund will focus on the needs of high-tech firms” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 1:6). “At the heart of our approach to building a strong and fair Britain is a commitment to support enterprise” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 1:7).

Both the Tories and Labour cling to the 1990s Californian ideology (throwing public money at ICT companies and thereby hoping for economic prosperity and a new job wonder). The result of the Californian ideology was not long-time economic growth, stability, and a new job wonder, but the bursting of the Internet economy bubble in 2000 and as a result the new economy crisis. It is therefore surprising that the two largest British parties show continued faith in ICT and Internet corporatism and do not look for possibilities for public investment in alternative Internet and ICT models that try to go beyond crisis capitalism, finance capital, and try to see the Internet and ICTs as part of society’s commons. The Internet that both parties imagine is one that is dominated by monopoly capital, and in a nationalistic tone it is envisioned that Internet monopolies will be British in the future. So the Tories speak of the “ambition that the next generation of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies“ (Conservative Technology Manifesto 2010, p. 2). There is not the slightest awareness in these documents of the many problems associated with Internet and ICT monopolies and the domination of the Internet by capitalist logic.

Both the Tories and Labour consider ICTs and the Internet important for public administration and democracy. However, the ideas of both parties on digital democracy are conventional and do not go beyond eGovernment. The Tories want to increase the transparency of public administration with the help of the Internet: ”We will open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online, saving costs and increasing transparency. [...] We will: require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and organograms that include all positions in those bodies “ (Conservative Manifesto 2010, p. 69). We will “require senior civil servants to publish online details of expense claims and meetings with lobbyists; examine the case for giving Select Committees the power to prevent increases“ (p. 70).

Similar announcements can be found in Labour’s election programme: “Public services in the digital age: Citizens expect their public services to be transparent, interactive and easily accessible. We will open up government, embedding access to information and data into the very fabric of public services. Citizens should be able to compare local services, demand improvements, choose between providers, and hold government to account. We have led the world with the creation of data.gov.uk, putting over 3,000 government datasets online. Entrepreneurs and developers have used these datasets to unleash social innovation, creating applications and websites for citizens from local crime maps to new guides to help find good care homes or GPs. We will now publish a Domesday Book of all non-personal datasets held by government and its agencies, with a default assumption that these will be made public. We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction with service providers and the wider community“ (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 9:5).

The Tories present themselves as the harbingers of direct democracy: ”Give citizens more power: People have been shut out of Westminster politics for too long. Having a single vote every four or five years is not good enough – we need to give people real control over how they are governed. So, with a Conservative government, any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament. and we  will introduce a new Public reading Stage for bills to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online” (Conservative Manifesto 2010, p. 66). ”We will throw open the doors of Parliament by introducing a technology enabled Public Reading Stage that will involve the public in the legislative process, and harness the wisdom of crowds to improve bills and spot potential problems before legislation is implemented” (Conservative Technology Manifesto 2010, p. 3). The idea of the Conservatives is to let citizens suggest proposals that are discussed in parliament and to make use of the Internet to let citizens express their opinion on proposed legislation. This means that they want to foster political talking and interaction, but do not want to give citizens real power to influence and decide on legislation outside of general elections. The suggested reforms are not an expression of grassroots democracy and grassroots digital democracy, but rather of populist digital plebiscitarianism or what Carole Pateman in the 1970s called pseudo-participation: citizens are summoned to “participate” by communicating and voicing opinions in order to silence them and discourage real participatory politics, in which they can directly influence decisions and have a say in politics.

Also Labour wants to strengthen democracy with the help of ICTs and the Internet, although their ideas remain more abstract: “Opening up government – central and local – in this way offers huge potential for Britain. We can use new technologies to give people a say on policy-making; enable citizens to carry out more of their dealings with government online; and save money for taxpayers as we switch services over to digital-only delivery” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p.  9:5). It remains unclear what exactly it means to “use new technologies to give people a say on policy-making”. Such a vague abstractness is a shame for an election programme.

Both the Tories and Labour understand digital democracy to mean that government provides more information to citizens with the help of ICTs and that citizens can communicate opinions to politicians, the government, and parliament with the help of the Internet. This understanding of digital democracy is narrow because it fully leaves out the importance of civil society and citizen-to-citizen political communication for a flourishing and dynamic democracy. The notion of democracy is confined to politics, there is no talk about economic democracy, work place democracy, and democracy in other spheres of society and the role that ICTs and the Internet could play for advancing participatory democracy in all realms of society. The understandings of digital democracy that can be found in the election manifestos of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are one-dimensional, government-focused, and do not realize the actual potentials that the Internet can pose for democratic reforms that enable participatory democracy.

The Tories speak about the threats of a “database state” (Conservative Manifesto 2010, p. 79). “We will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data. We will take further steps to protect people from unwarranted intrusion by the state” (p. 79). It is no surprise that the Conservatives do see privacy threats, problems of surveillance and data misuse only in relation to public administration and not also in the context of private companies that gather, store, assess, and sell personal data for economic ends because the Tories have a neoliberal ICT agenda in mind that only considers ICT and Internet companies as harbingers of economic growth, but not as potential threats to consumer and user interests. Economic surveillance is not an issue for the Conservatives, but neither is it one for the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.

The only realm, where the Conservatives see problems of a corporate Internet, is in relation to children. They argue that children should be protected from online advertising. “Children should be allowed to grow up at their own pace, without excessive pressure placed on them by businesses. We will take a series of measures to help reverse the commercialisation of childhood. We prefer to gain voluntary consent to these actions but we are prepared to legislate if necessary. We will: * prevent any marketing or advertising company found to be in serious breach of  rules governing marketing to children from bidding for government advertising contracts for three years; * ban companies from using new peer-to-peer marketing techniques targeted at children, and tackle marketing on corporate websites targeted at children; * establish a new online system that gives parents greater powers to take action against irresponsible commercial activities targeted at children; and, * empower head teachers and governors to ban advertising and vending machines in schools“ (Conservative Manifesto 2010, p. 43). One wonders why only children need protection from online advertising? Also adolescents and adults have to fear negative consequences from the activities of online advertisers and Internet corporations that gather and commodify personal data for economic ends as well as from employers and managers who look for private information about job applicants and employees on web 2.0.

The Labour Party mentions eLearning in one paragraph, whereas both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats do not tackle this topic at all. “Because the learning environment itself matters, we will take forward our Building Schools for the Future programme to rebuild or refurbish secondary schools, giving our children first-rate facilities that support inspirational teaching and access to ICT, sports and the arts” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 3:5). The view underlying this passage is that more ICTs are always good for learning, there is no sense for what kind of ICTs and that a blended approach is needed that combines participatory educational institutions with participatory learning technologies.

66% of British Internet users aged 15-24 say that it is morally acceptable to download music for free and 70% say they do not feel guilty for downloading music for free (Youth and Media survey 2009, N=1026, Office of Communications: Communication Market Report 2009, 278). Refusing and opposing the interests of young people and other citizens, both the Conservatives and the Labour Party intend to continue the criminalization of file sharers in order to guarantee profit interests for the culture industry. No matter which party will be in power, a tightening of intellectual property right protection and of the repression against file sharers and thereby the interest of the majority of young people can be expected. The Labour Party has announced: “We will update the intellectual property framework that is crucial to the creative industries – and take further action to tackle online piracy” (Labour Party Manifesto 2010, p. 7:6). Similarly the Tories have said: “We will ensure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual framework in the world for innovators and high tech businesses. We recognise the need to tackle digital piracy and make it possible for people to buy and sell digital intellectual property online. However it is vital that any anti-piracy measures promote new business models rather than holding innovation back” (Conservative Technology Manifesto 2010, p. 7).

Both parties miss an understanding of the question if free access to digital knowledge is a form of cultural democracy that strengthens capabilities, communication, the public sphere, and cultural dynamics. They put the corporate interests of the culture industry first and above the interests of cultural prosumers. Also alternative policy measures, such as the culture flat rate, are not discussed. The actual or potential criminalization of a large share of Internet users is simply accepted, not questioned. Also the problem of how cultural production can be remunerated in an age of file sharing without enhancing the dependency of these producers on large media companies and without criminalizing users is not discussed.

Conclusion

No matter if the solution to the situation of a hung parliament in Great Britain will be a Conservative or a Labour government supported by the Liberal Democrats, one thing is for sure: there will not be any significant positive changes in the realm of Internet and ICT politics and policies. The Liberal Democrats have simply ignored this topic in their 2010 election manifesto, which shows that they consider the Internet and ICTs as unimportant. In contrast, the Labour Party and the Conservatives compete for which of the two parties can create a more neoliberal ICT policy framework. Both Labour and the Tories stand for the advancement of the commodification of the Internet and ICTs, the weakening and economization of the cultural commons of society, the criminalization of Internet users, opposition to the cultural interests of young Internet users, ignorance towards ICT-enhanced participatory democracy, civil society, and citizen-to-citizen political communication; and the focus on conventional and unoriginal eGovernment measures. In the UK, government will in the coming years pursue Internet politics with a backwards-oriented neo-neoliberal agenda. We can expect an extension and intensification of neoliberal Internet policies. The answer to the question asked in the title of this contribution is: No!

Interviewees included: Chris Anderson (Wired magazine), John Battelle (author of “The Search”), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), danah boyd (Microsoft Research), Shami Chakrabarti (director of the civil rights group Liberty), Stephen Fry (actor, writer, director, presenter), David Gallagher (New York Times), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Seth Goldstein (Attention Trust), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Andrew Keen (author of “The Cult of the Amateur”), Martha Lane Fox (lastminute.com), James Marcus (Amazon), Douglas Rushkoff (author of “Life Inc”), Eric Schmidt (Google), Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton), Terry Winograd (Stanford University), Steve Wozniak (Apple).

The documentary maintains that online activities like searching on Google, uploading pictures on Flickr, or using social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspae, seem to be free, but come at a price: the disclosure of private information to companies that sell these data to advertising clients in order to make money profit.

Amazon is presented as one of the early pioneers that advanced the commercialization of the web in the 1990s. Google is seen as big money-making machine that makes use of the ethos of free access to information, turns users into commodities, and is building a monopoly in Internet advertising. The documentary also presents the case of AOL that in 2006 released a file that contained the searches 650,000 users made over a period of three months. The file did not contain the names of the persons who conducted the searches, but the data was so intimate that in many cases it allowed the identification of the users.

The documentary shows that officials of Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, or Netflix tend to argue that targeted advertising and targeted recommendation systems that are based on online data surveillance enrich the users’ experience and provide them with information that they could find interesting. It is no accident, that there is so much talk about the importance of user experience in the Internet industry and in Human Computer Interaction research. So for example, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of the online movie provider Netflix, says: “It is all about pleasing the consumer”. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says: “The average person seems very pragmatic about it. As long as it works and as long as all the laws are followed, they seem perfectly happy to share personal information to make their experience better”. However, there are many voices in this documentary that express doubts about these positive views.

The maker of the documentary, Aleks Krotoski, maintains that our “thoughts and desires that we express online are being traced, tracked, and traded in pursuit of profit”. She speaks of the ”brave new web” and remarks: “In return for our free web, our privacy has become a commodity. We are economic units in what has become the new commercial frontier”. Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Life Inc”, says: “The product online is not the content, the product online is you!”. “And the darker side of the web, to some extent includes the ability of those behind the screen, those who are providing this space for you, to monitor you”, argues Shami Chakrabarati, who is director of the civil rights group Liberty.

Krotoski quotes from a research paper of the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm”. Google today no longer stays in line with these intellectual roots, it stores and analyzes all information searches in order to sell targeted advertisings.

In my view the documentary does not make exactly clear what the problem of the large-scale surveillance of information behaviour on the Internet by companies actually is. Is surveillance the problem as such? Is it an intrinsic or extrinsic problem? If it is extrinsic, then surveillance needs to be seen as constituting a problem in relation to its societal context. One can imagine societies, where voluntary sharing of personal data and resulting data collection and storage does not bring potential disadvantages such as job loss, an advertising spam flood, stalking, harassment, etc. But unfortunately we do not live in such a world, and therefore privacy protection mechanisms are needed. The implications of surveillance in a stratified world are causing problems. Stratification of modern societies means that certain groups and individuals compete for the control and increase of resourses. Therefore they have to consider others as their opponents. Certain groups and individuals benefit from certain circumstances at the expense of others. Such competitive relations can be found in all realms of modern society, such as the economy, politics, culture, and personal relations. Given competitive relations, information about personal preferences and individual behaviour can cause harm to individuals if it gets into the hands of their opponents or others who might have an interest in harming them. Large-scale data gathering and surveillance in a society that is based on the principle of competition poses certain threats to the well-being of all citizens. Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others. If such collections are owned privately, then access to data might be sold because there is an economic interest in accumulating money.

Another problem of online data surveillance by corporations is that it is inherently linked to economic class formation and exploitation. I have described this circumstance in more detail in a recent paper that was published by the journal Media, Culture & Society: Fuchs, Christian. 2010. Class, knowledge and new media. Media, Culture & Society 32 (1): 141-150 (http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/32/1/141).

I argue in this paper that obviously targeted online advertising produces money profit for Internet corporations and that therefore the question arises, who creates economic value on web 2.0. Critical political economist Dallas Smythe in his seminal paper “On the audience commodity and its work” suggested that advertising business models of the media are not primarily based on the commodification of content, but the commodification of the audience. Although also content may be sold as a commodity (you buy a newspaper or magazine for 1 euro, etc), the primary source of economic value for many commercial media is that they sell their audience to advertising clients and thereby accumulate capital. With the rise of user-generated content and free access social networking platforms and other free access platforms that yield profit by online advertisement, the world wide web seems to come close to accumulation strategies employed by the capital on traditional mass media like TV or radio.

The users who google data, upload or watch videos on YouTube, upload or browse personal images on Flickr, or accumulate friends with whom they exchange content or communicate online via social networking platforms like MySpace or Facebook, constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet is that in the latter the users are also content producers; there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building and content-production. That the users are more active on the Internet than in the reception of TV or radio content is due to the decentralized structure of the Internet, which allows many-to-many communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as producers, I would argue, in the case of the Internet, that the audience commodity is a produser commodity. The category of the produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity. Much of the time spent online produces profit for large corporations like Google, News Corp. (which owns MySpace), or Yahoo! (which owns Flickr). Advertisements on the Internet are frequently personalized; this is made possible by surveilling, storing and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases. This is another difference from TV and radio, which provide less individualized content and advertisements due to their more centralized structure.

I have argued in my book “Internet and Society” that in the digital economy we find an antagonism between the networked productive forces and the class-based relations of production that are based on private ownership. We can observe this very well in the case of Google and other web 2.0 platforms. At the level of the technological productive forces, we see that Google advances socialization, the co-operative and common character of the online-productive forces: Google tools are available for free, Google Documents allows the collaborative creation of documents; GMail, Blogger, and Buzz enable social networking and communication, YouTube supports sharing videos, Google Scholar and Google Books help better access worldwide academic knowledge, etc. These are all applications that can give great benefits to humans. But at the level of the relations of production, Google is a profit-oriented, advertising-financed money-making machine that turns users and their personal data into a commodity. And the result is large-scale surveillance and the immanent undermining of liberal democracy’s intrinsic privacy value. Liberal democratic values thereby constitute their own limit and immanent critique.

So on the level of the productive forces, Google and other web 2.0 platforms anticipate a commons-based public Internet from which all benefit, whereas the freedom (free service access) that it provides is now enabled by online surveillance and user commodification that threatens privacy. Google is a nice prototypical example for the antagonisms between networked productive forces and capitalist relations of production of the information economy.

But are there alternatives?

Eben Moglen, who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, gave a talk on “Freedom in the cloud: software freedom, privacy and security for web 2.0 and cloud computing” on February 5, 2010 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA). He suggested an Internet architecture, in which every user has a personal web server that s/he can put in his/her pocket, plug in at any place, that stores all personal online data, keeps log files, connects to the Internet, and sends encrypted back-ups of data to the users’ friends servers in case that they communicate with them. The architecture would be easy to realize, all hardware and systems, and software would be available and could be operated with the help of free software. Moglen describes a way for restoring the autonomy of users as owners of their data. If such an Internet architecture is implemented, this will inevitably require struggles for the release of personal data to users and the cleanup of these data on the servers of Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, etc because one can bet that these corporations will rather be unwilling to decommodify the Internet prosumer commodity.

Editors: Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, Marisol Sandoval

Supported by COST: European Cooperation in Science and Technology, COST Action Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS, IS0807), Working Group 2: Surveillance Technologies in Practice

Abstract submissions until October 15, 2009 (deadline) to christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at

The overall aim of this collected volume is to bring together contributions that show how surveillance works on the Internet and which risks are connected to Internet surveillance in general and surveillance connected to “web 2.0” and “social software” in particular.

The publication and publishing process is part of the COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies” (LiSS) (2009-2012, see http://w3.cost.esf.org/index.php?id=233&action_number=IS0807 for further information and details) and is a project by the LiSS working group “Surveillance Technologies in Practice”. The editors are members of this working group.

Routledge has expressed interest in publishing this volume.

The collection of data for organizing bureaucratic and economic life is inherent in modern society. At the same time that privacy has been postulated as important value of modern society, privacy-threatening surveillance mechanisms have been structurally implemented and institutionalized in modern society. This collected volume explores perspectives on privacy, surveillance, and the privacy-surveillance-paradox in relation to the Internet.

Background

Many observers claim that the Internet has been transformed in the past years from a system that is primarily oriented on information provision into a system that is more oriented on communication and community building. The notions of “web 2.0”, “social Software”, and “social network(ing) sites” have emerged in this context. Web platforms such as Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Blogger, Rapidshare, WordPress, Hi5, Flickr, Photobucket, Orkut, Skyrock, Twitter, YouPorn, PornHub, Youku, Orkut, Redtube, Friendster, Adultfriendfinder, Megavideo, Tagged, Tube8, Mediafire, Megaupload, Mixi, Livejournal, LinkedIn, Netlog, ThePirateBay, Orkut, XVideos, Metacafe, Digg, StudiVZ, etc are said to be typical for this transformation of the Internet. No matter if we agree that important transformations of the Internet have taken place or not, it is clear that a principle that underlies such platforms is the massive provision and storage of
personal data that are systematically evaluated, marketed, and used for targeting users with advertising. In a world of global economic competition, economic crisis, and fear of terrorism after 9/11, especially two kinds of actors are interested in accessing such personal data: corporations on the one hand and state institutions on the other hand. Will the Internet under the current societal conditions advance the intensification and extension of surveillance so that a coercive and totalitarian surveillance society that George Orwell would have only thought about in his worst dreams will emerge or not? Are there counter-tendencies? The contributions in this book deal with these topics by elaborating theoretical concepts and presenting the results of empirical case studies.

We are especially interested in papers that do not primarily discuss single examples, but attempt to discuss Internet surveillance from a broad perspective that takes into account societal contexts or that embed examples or case studies into the discussion of societal contexts.

Research Questions

Chapters could for example relate to one or more of the following questions:
* What is electronic surveillance? What are specific qualities of electronic surveillance on the Internet? How does Internet surveillance differ from other forms of surveillance?
* Which theories do we need for thinking about Internet & surveillance? How important (or how outdated) are the thoughts by Michel Foucault and George Orwell for studying surveillance on the Internet? How suitable are the theories of thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, Anthony Giddens, and others for the analysis and conceptualization of Internet surveillance?
* What is the relationship of privacy and surveillance in respect to the Internet?
* What is privacy, how should it be defined, and how does it change in the age of the Internet?
* Is Internet surveillance a form of “new surveillance” (Gary Marx)? What are the differences and commonalities between Internet surveillance and concepts such as computer surveillance, dataveillance (Roger Clarke), the electronic panopticon (Mark Poster), electronic surveillance (David Lyon), the panoptic sort (Oscar H. Gandy), social Taylorism of surveillance (Frank Webster, Kevin Robins), or the synopticon (Thomas Mathiesen)?
* What are the normative and ethical implications of Internet & surveillance?
* What is a surveillance society and what is the role of the Internet in surveillance society? Should the notions of surveillance and surveillance society be used as general, neutral terms or as negative terms? What are the implications of certain definitions of surveillance and surveillance society for studying the Internet?
* What does it mean to study Internet & surveillance critically? What is a critical theory of Internet surveillance, what are critical studies of Internet & surveillance? What are the ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological dimensions of such studies?
* What are central aspects of the political economy of surveillance on the Internet?
* What is the role of surveillance for “web 2.0” and “social software”? How is surveillance connected with mass self-communication and communication power/counter-power (Manuel Castells) in web 2.0?
* What is the role of surveillance on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook?
* How is surveillance used in the Internet economy? What problems are connected to surveillance in the Internet economy? What is the role of surveillance for Internet business models?
* How does targeted advertising work as economic mechanism for generating profit? What are the problems that are connected to it?
* Presentation and generalization of case studies about how specific Internet platforms (Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc) or applications use surveillance and about the connected problems and threats.
* How are terms of use and privacy terms designed by Internet corporations in order to enable surveillance? What are the problems and societal implications connected to such practices?
* How has surveillance on the Internet changed after 9/11?
* Which different legal frameworks for surveillance on the Internet are there (international comparison) and how have they changed after 9/11?
* What are the major threats and problems of surveillance on the Internet?
* What is to be done in order to solve the problems that are connected to surveillance on the Internet? What is the role of information policies, data protection, governments, governance, civil society, and social movements in this respect?
* How do social movements and groups that struggle against the establishment of a “maximum surveillance society” (Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong) make use of the Internet for cyberprotest and cyberactivism?
* How do Internet & society have to be designed in order to avoid the emergence of a total surveillance society? Which alternative design principles for Internet & society are needed in this context? What is the role of privacy-enhancing Internet technologies in this context?
* Which Internet surveillance technologies are there and how can they be systematically classified?
* What is the role of surveillance and surveillance technologies in Internet-based eGovernment and eGovernance?

Submission of Structured Abstracts:

Please submit structured abstracts for chapter proposals, short author biography/biographies, and your contact details (in a word document) until October 15th, 2009 to Christian Fuchs by email: christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at. The editors are interested in abstracts for original, unpublished contributions that have not been submitted for consideration in journals or other publications.

The abstracts should adhere to the following structured format and should have approximately 650-900 words.

(1) Purpose
What are the reasons for writing this chapter? Why is the topic important? What are the aims of research? What are the research questions?
(2) Approach/Theoretical framework/Design/Methodology
How are the objectives achieved? Include the main method(s) used for the research [theory construction is also considered as a method in this context]. What is the approach to the topic and what is the theoretical or subject scope of the paper?
(3) Findings
What was found in the course of the work? What are the main results presented in the chapter? This will refer to analysis, discussion, or results.
(4) Research limitations/implications (if applicable)
Suggestions for future research and any identified limitations in the research process. Implications for academic fields, disciplines, state of the art.
(4) Practical and societal implications (if applicable)
What outcomes and implications for practice, applications and consequences are identified? How will the research impact upon society? How will it influence public attitudes? How could it inform civil society or public or industry policy? What changes to human practices should be made as a result of this research? How might it affect quality of life? Not all chapters must necessarily have practical and societal implications.
(5) Originality/value
What is new in the paper? How does it differ from and go beyond the state of the art in respective research fields? State the value of the paper and for whom it is relevant.

Author short biographies should be approximately 200-300 words and contain information on academic position, institutional affiliation, research interests and topics, major publications, projects, networks, affiliations, roles, etc.

Time Schedule

October 15, 2009: deadline for the submission of structured abstracts of chapter proposals
End of October 2009: notification of authors on acceptance/decline of proposals; submission of the overall proposal, abstracts, author data to Routledge
End of November 2009: decision on publication by the publisher
End of September 2010: deadline for the submission of full chapters (further details will be announced)
End of November 2010: feedback of review comments to the authors
End of December 2010: submission of final versions of chapters
January 2011: submission of final manuscript to the publisher

About the Editors
Christian Fuchs is associate professor for ICTs and society at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is management committee member of the COST Action “Living in Surveillance Society” (LiSS) and member of the LiSS working group “Surveillance Technologies in Practice”. Kees Boersma is associate professor for science and technology studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is leader of the working group “Surveillance Technologies in Practice” and management committee member of the COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies”.  Anders Albrechtslund is assistant professor for surveillance and ethics at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is management committee member of the COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies” and member of the LiSS working group “Surveillance Technologies in Practice”. Marisol Sandoval is research associate at the University of Salzburg, Austria. She is member of the working group “Surveillance Technologies in Practice” of the COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies”.