Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis interrogates processes of digital subject production within the contemporary \ncontext of increasingly widespread and networked systems of U.S. state and corporate \nsurveillance. Starting with an analysis of corporate datamining practices in mainstream \nsocial media spaces, I argue that users??? digital consumptive labor undergoes processes of \ncommodification that function to essentialize and perpetuate hegemonic constructions of \nidentity categories. I then examine the ways in which the U.S. government deploys post- \n9/11 ???war on terror??? discourses to justify the use of biometric surveillance technologies \nand the appropriation of private sector surveillance data and resources as regulatory \nmechanisms in order to identify, isolate, and criminalize deviant and dissenting bodies \nwhile simultaneously producing docile, patriotic, and neoliberal digital subjects. Finally, I \nexplore how this surveillant assemblage surrounding digital consumption, social media \nspaces, and the growing information economy produce essentialized notions of physical \nembodiment in ways that attempt to solidify categories of identity across gender, race, \nclass, and ability; thereby foreclosing potential understandings of contextual, situated, \nand hybrid identities, subjectivities, and expressions, and limiting the possibility for \nsocial recognition and relationality across difference.
Author: Riese Jordan Lin
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2592720571