Lam Chun Yiu, SID:10613053, Blog Post 1.

Blog post 1

Andrejevic, M. (2002). The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media

and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure. Critical Studies in Media

Communication, 19(2), 230-248

In this essay, it offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who provide comprehensive surveillance to address the convenience and participation can perform valuable work for the corporations and marketers, being watched is a form of value-generating labour. In the essay, it uses the examples of the online economy to explain and fulfil the consumer labour model.

One of the points that I feel interested in the essay, is the productive surveillance. The author argues that productive surveillance extends various forms of online consumption and enhance economic productivity. In page 234, it mentioned that not only consumers’ past preferences and socioeconomic backgrounds but also the details of the moment, like location, the time of day, these things can be considered in multiplication of consumption categories and this category can beneficial productive disciplinary power to stimulates the proliferation of desiring subjectivities.

One of the examples can apply to this point, is online shopping. A consumer when he/she is shopping through some websites, the system will not know his/her tastes or preferences. However, for an example, usually, in the website, when you searched a product A, the website will also recommend another product B to you, which is another user who bought product A, also bought product B too. The website system will use this logic to guess what you like. Apart from that, the system also will according to your past consume records to recommend other products to you. These actions of the system are the surveillance and the users can count as a labour who provide their information. It can enhance the probability that a consumer finds other products that he/she like and consume more. ( https://www.amazon.com/adidas-Performance-Ultraboost-Running-Crystal/dp/B01H645IWM/ref=sr_1_47?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1481543226&sr=1-47&nodeID=7147441011&keywords=adidas+shoes)

I agree with this point, but there has a problem. Although the system can through surveille different users consume records to recommend other products to a user, every user/consumer is an individual, who is different than others, the system can’t clearly know a consumer’s taste or habit. I think only accumulation can solve this problem, consumer cumulative their consume record to let system collect more data, it can improve the accuracy.

Finally, I have a question, I think accumulation is a method can solve the problem, but this method has a large disadvantage, which is the time, cumulative data to create a multiplication of consumption categories need to wait a lot of time, how to reduce the time to collect data is a big question.