Andrejevic Mark

The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure

Abstract

Much of the ongoing discussion of online surveillance and corporate data mining has focused on the question of privacy. This paper argues that the appeal to privacy rights is a double-edged weapon in the struggle against what amounts to the increasing privatization of demographic information.

Rather than thinking about corporate surveillance in terms of privacy, this paper argues that we should consider the extension of online monitoring in terms of the power relations that characterize the forms of surveillance-based rationalization associated with the workplace. In the era of new media interactivity, the development of customized marketing and production is increasingly reliant upon the work consumers and viewers perform by submitting to comprehensive surveillance. The fact that the business literature considers interactive media as a means of off-loading the labor of marketing research onto consumers suggests that critical theorists ought to take the notion of consumer labor seriously.

This paper explores the role of the ³labor of being watched² in rationalizing the process of customized consumption generally and of television viewing in particular. By way of example, I discuss the case of digital VCR technology, which allows consumers to generate demographic information by being monitored while they are watching TV.

The paper also develops an alternative conception of the digital enclosure, suggesting that commercial entities have an economic incentive to foreclose alternatives to interactive formats that compel self-disclosure on the part of consumers and viewers.