Social Media Surveillance and Visibility
Discussion and Conclusions
Businesses are turning to social media to scrutinize personal information as well as provide targeted content to users. An emerging personal information economy relies not only on personal details submitted by users but also on prolonged engagement with these users in social networks. Social ties are increasingly valued as part of emerging monetization strategies on social media. These developments suggest two possibilities or two visions that are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, industry literature emphasizes the importance of community building online. This creates an enduring space that prioritizes ongoing relations between brand enthusiasts and representatives. This kind of space is deliberately themed by the brand, but this does not exclude other opportunities for monetization.
Yet all that is being described here resonates with Andrejevic's notion of the digital enclosure. Social media services present themselves in terms of sharing free content. Yet ownership of this content is crucial, especially because these enclosures are used for a broad range of scrutiny and social sorting. The enclosure is a space but also a process where "a variety of strategies for privatizing, controlling, and commoditizing information and intellectual property." This suggests an ongoing development where practices are fluid and emerging and where users may grow accustomed to living under pervasive scrutiny.
While respondents and industry literature offer a more positive description, they describe a scenario where users have a prolonged engagement with businesses, giving up personal information in exchange for targeted content. The extent to which these two perspectives overlap remains an ongoing topic of inquiry, and insight can be obtained by looking at how the term social features in these configurations. To be sure, the term social is notoriously difficult to isolate. The question "What's social about social media?" underlies this research. It refers to the convergence of social contexts, as users cannot keep personal information in one frame. The social in social media also reconfigure information flows. Wade claims these flows become socialized insofar as they "are about the people who you know or the people you care about, friends, family, people who you follow for professional reasons as thought leaders." Here, social refers to social ties. This paper suggests social ties are growing from the basis of an emergent media to a vital component in emergent business models. Damien highlights the social value of social media, claiming:
Technology is finally beginning to deliver social value from the standpoint of allowing you to control your destiny, your voice, the way you are published, who you interact with, and how things are protected or not as you conduct those interactions.
Damien presents Facebook's social functionality in terms of affordances to users but also to businesses that engage with the site. He goes on to describe a conflation of the two:
Social media users are increasingly becoming developers because of your ability to go into Facebook, add new applications to it you know, create a fan page, and connect with many other people in your customer ecosystem. All of those things used to require software developers; they are now things that you are I can do yourself. So, when we talk about power – not only the tool and the user gets more powerful, the ability to manipulate that tool and connect it to other platforms and tools is now becoming ... in the hand of you and I, as opposed to in the hands of developers.
This is described as a kind of empowerment where users can operate while unfettered by corporations, but this also benefits businesses that take advantage of the labor and feedback of users. In either case, these are being treated as spaces for long–term engagement. While it may be too soon to tell, social media seem to intersect interpersonal sociality and corporate monetization.
The interviews in this study highlight the complexity of market–based surveillance on social media. Businesses are using sites like Facebook for different ends. Various kinds of labor are situated on social media, including brand management, market research, and customer service. Yet at this stage, some patterns are emerging. Through Facebook, businesses have access to a range of personal information pertaining to their brands, products, and markets. Much of this information is generated from people making themselves visible to each other. Their scope is augmented because they share the same interface and information with interpersonal exchanges. In addition, respondents mimic interpersonal surveillance to engage with users. A conversational approach with users is prescribed to maintain these relations, suggesting that businesses are employing interpersonal surveillance tactics to augment market surveillance.