Digital Omniscience Dashboard
Surveillance Capitalism: A form of capitalism using technology for its purposes. Providing free services that monitor user’s behaviour, often without their consent. The user’s personal information is commodified by businesses claiming their experience as a free raw material, this can then be used to predict how the user will behave in the future.
Newly available data sources have dramatically increased the quantity and variety of data available. Therefore, increasing economies of scope: increasing the variety of data that can be collected, and increasing economies of scale: a lot of these different data can be collected.
Shoshana Zuboff’s, the main theorist in the subject, argues this is what Surveillance Capitalism needs to flourish, also that our emerging ‘sensor-based society’ will make surveillance capitalism more embedded and pervasive in our lives.
My response to the brief:
A Digital Omniscience Interface – The State of Knowing everything, in this case, digital data collected about a user through the use of free services. This is what Surveillance Capitalists, such as Facebook and Google, aim to achieve, and this is what I will show through my project.
Should we accept this data collection as the new normal in continuous data surveillance?
My project aims to expose the variety and scale of data collection which can be used by surveillance capitalists. I place digital self at the centre of this exposé, revealing my digital self through social media, CCTV surveillance images, recorded audio data, online activity and wearable technology.