10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17153
application/pdf
2038-3460
17153
2
en
Andrea Mubi Brighenti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Daniel Trottier, Social Media as Surveillance. Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World, Ashgate, 2012
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
4
Book Reviews
2014-01-04
2023-06-12
2014-01-04
2023-11-07
150-152
TS
Andrea Mubi Brighenti
2013
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17153
150
University of Trento
2038-3460
2
en
152
Daniel Trottier, Social Media as Surveillance. Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World, Ashgate, 2012
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17153/16060
4
150                                                            Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

Daniel Trottier
Social Media as Surveillance. Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World
Farnham, Ashgate, 2012, pp. 222

Andrea Mubi Brighenti University of Trento

    The so-called social media increasingly form everyday living spaces,
spaces where we dwell and which we cross both digitally and materially.
Their hybridity and cogency – their veritable ‘territoriality’ – become ap-
parent when we consider how connectedness to the media now accompa-
nies us in our pockets as well as across the urban spaces we inhabit. Sim-
ultaneously, digital media are spaces of visibility and inter-visibility. As
such, they entail all the promises and perils of exposure. If, by public do-
main, we mean a contested territory of visibilities and appropriations, so-
cial media should be recognized as a noticeable part of it. The phenome-
non Simmel first described as the ‘mixing of social circles’ now takes
place in such an enlarged mediated public domain. This fact may cause
problems. In other words, since people live different aspects of their lives
on these media, the social circles one belongs to can end up by intersect-
ing dangerously.
    In his book, Daniel Trottier has sought to understand how the har-
vesting of personal information for institutional, business or policing
purposes – which, on the social media, is an ongoing task – can change
people’s life. From a slightly different perspective, perhaps, it could be
said that the problem arises from a double tension: on the one hand,
there is a tension between different interactional registers in our lives,
which vary in function of the social context – e.g. family, intimate, study,
professional, recreational contexts and so on; on the other hand, there is a
tension between the transience that characterizes the mundane details of
everyday life and the permanence of networked digital data (let us not
forget, resilience was initially a much sought-for quality that drove the
development of digital networks). So, data that we did not mean to create
– or that we meant to create for a specific purpose – are in fact created
and get disseminated in ways which can hardly be controlled by its crea-
tors. A fortiori, these user profiles, posts, entries, comments and logs can
be searched, collected and studied, that is, used by different people for
very different purposes.
    According to Foucault, surveillance is always a cooperative activity,
for it entails self-surveillance, alias disciplination. While, taking a broader
definition of surveillance, this might not always be the case, in the sense
that we could also speak of surveillance in cases where people are una-
ware of being scrutinized, still, it is certain that in the domain of the social
media a wide array of ‘self-surveillant’ practices is present: many people
consciously take advantage of the visibility of others and no less con-
sciously put themselves on stage, distributing personal information about
Book Review                                                              151
themselves for a number of reasons, ranging from having a laugh with
friends to promoting their professional activity. The problem, however, is
that simultaneously users of social media platforms have very limited con-
trol over the content that circulates in both their restrained social circles
and the media sphere more generally. Most people, in other words, can
barely keep up with the technical and legal knowledge about settings and
regulations, as well as with the sheer quantity of user-generated content.
Precisely for this reason, we increasingly record concerns about the ‘risks’
associated with personal information disclosure. So, while we might not
always find the ‘disciplination of conducts’ Foucault had in mind, we can
certainly observe an array of practices consisting in the ‘disciplination of
data’ and data production. The focus, in other words, might not be so
much on what one actually does, as much as on which data end up being
uploaded and whether or not they ‘leak’ somewhere.
    Trottier’s research – based on three sets of semi-structured interviews
about Facebook usage, respectively with 30 undergraduates students at a
large Canadian university, 14 university administrators and campus em-
ployees, and 13 business consultants – illustrates this point. In the first
place, social media are a space of interpersonal surveillance, where users
are both the subjects and the agents of surveillance. The interactional
games Goffman described as ‘impression management’ and ‘face-work’
are extensively re-enacted on social media. As one interviewee plainly put
it: “there’s a necessity to defend yourself or prevent people from really
seeing [your own] problematic behaviors such as drinking or, you know,
embarrassing photos that have a tendency to get up on Facebook even
when you don’t want them to” (p. 111). We thus find that pressure to
join the media leads to increasing reliance on social media platforms for a
number of purposes like meeting friends. Simultaneously, the attempt to
secure privacy and the concerns about personal reputations also deter-
mine the emergence of sets of normative expectations about acceptable
behavior along, with attempts to sanction stalking and other forms of per-
sonal harassment. “Users – writes Trottier to summarize these complex
and partly contradictory requirements – feel responsible for their pres-
ence, but aware that managing this presence is beyond their control” (p.
82).
    Besides interpersonal surveillance, social media also enable a good
deal of ‘parasitical usages’, in other words they help all those jobs and
professions whose business is to focus on the behaviour – as well as atti-
tudes! – of consumers, customers or suspects, by extracting information
voluntarily provided by users (albeit, in many cases, for different purpos-
es). These ‘parasitical’ actors may of course also have their hard time, not
so much in accessing data, as much as in coping with the increasing
amount of information that exists on social media. As one interviewed
university marketing and communication expert admitted: “it’s very ex-
plosive, this use of social media that it’s pretty hard to keep on top of,
there’s no one person that can control or audit everything that’s happen-
152                                                          Tecnoscienza – 4 (2)

ing” (p. 94). Thus, specialized procedure of visibilitization become pivot-
al, insofar as they provide the essential tools to identify relevant social
media data and make sense of them. The capacity of an institution – be it
a university or the police – or a market actor to effectively surveil a target
population is proportional to its ability to ‘visibilize’ – rather than merely
visualize – information, that is, to crawl through the crowds of infor-
mation available in order to extract or reconstruct readable patterns. To
this, it should be added that, just as other digital media, social media are
interactive by definition. In such a fast-changing scenario, skilful surveil-
lance may function by elicitation, turning, once again, into something
akin to cooptation.
    With this book, Trottier has provided a valuable contribution to the
empirical study of everyday surveillance practices. The book is clear and
well organized, two qualities which also make it suitable for teaching
purposes. While his empirical research is limited to a tiny case (the use of
Facebook at a specific Canadian university) and does not include ethnog-
raphy – which would have arguably made it more exciting – it nonethe-
less manages to flesh out all the major points and issues in current social
media research.

!
                                    ***
!
!
Antonello Ciccozzi
Parola di scienza. Il terremoto dell’Aquila e la Commissione Grandi Rischi.
Un’analisi antropologica [The Word of Science. The L'Aquila Earthquake
and the Major Risks Committee. An Anthropological Analysis]
Verona, DeriveApprodi, 2013, pp. 188

Gemma Maltese University of Calabria / Lancaster University

    The book by Antonello Ciccozzi can be described as an open path
through the anthropological rooms and cultural semiospheres – as the au-
thor describes them – of the earthquake in the city and among the citizens
of L’Aquila. Through the case of the earthquake of L’Aquila, on the 6
April 2009, Ciccozzi shows the divisions, conflicts, dominations, subordi-
nations, alienations that are reproduced through the current relationships
between forms of subjected and dominant ‘knowledges’, in contemporary
capitalist societies.
    In that earthquake, Ciccozzi was directly involved in several senses: he
is a citizen of L’Aquila; he survived the earthquake; he was a ‘privileged’
witness during the different phases of the trial, appointed to investigate
the management of the earthquake of L’Aquila, and, in particular, the
