Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2018

Following the spread of digital media, the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies has gained prominence, engaging scholars from the humanities and the social sciences alike. This introductory article aims to map out the main terrain of surveillance through, by and in the media. First, we discuss the phenomenon of, and the scholarly work on, surveillance through and by media, taking into consideration both state and corporate surveillance and how these activities have grown with the new digital and personal media of today. We then discuss surveillance as the phenomenon is represented in the media and how representations relate to surveillance practices. We conclude by presenting the articles of this special issue.

The aim of this article is to analyse and compare how technologies of media monitoring have been imagined as seeing devices at two turning points in media history – around 1900 and in the 2000s. The press-cutting agencies that were established during the late nineteenth century, depending on human eyes and scissors, were said to deliver customized news updates, business data and information on public opinion. As seeing devices, they took names such as Argus, Observer and Atlas. These agencies made it possible to see the world on paper. Today, media monitoring depends on automatic processes rather than human eyes. Yet, digital technologies are usually represented by images of old media devices such as magnifying glasses, binoculars, telescopes and watchtowers. These well-known and transparent technologies make the black boxes of digital media seem less strange, but they might also mask the assumptions and complexities that are built into them.

In this article, I explore how conglomerates and the independent film companies in Norway conceptualize their social media strategies before the release of their films in movie theatres. I analyse applications made to the Norwegian Film Institute’s (NFI) support programme for promotional grants in 2015. The ability of individual companies to interpret and go beyond a framing of social media as semi-public platforms – where companies can gain visibility free of charge – is one indication of how strategic knowledge differs. Major distributors tend to perceive social media as a place to buy attention from a targeted audience. Thus, they are taking advantage of traffic data offered by surveillance technologies embedded in social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. This, I argue, is a distinct feature of strategic resources linked to power, networks and knowledge about audiences, which intensify power differentials between large, established corporations and small-scale independent players.

In political discussion, surveillance and privacy are often interconnected. This implies that the crucial choice we as citizens are expected to make is basically a trade-off: which do we value more: our security – which is partly safeguarded by surveillance – or our privacy? This article sets out to problematize the notion of trade-off through a conceptual analysis of surveillance and privacy. Given that surveillance and privacy belong to distinct conceptual systems, this analysis calls for two separate discussions. On the one hand, the analysis of surveillance needs to pay attention to the institutional legacy of surveillance practices and focus on the role of digital technologies in upgrading and extending the capacities of surveillance. The analysis of privacy, on the other hand, takes into account that people’s activities in privacy are embedded in the fabric of their everyday lives. Four set of practices seem central to privacy: dignity, retreat, anonymity and secrecy.

This article focuses on meta-coverage – what was said about journalism – in the debates evoked by the revelations about mass surveillance of Edward Snowden in 2013. Drawing on close readings of a wide sample of commentaries and other such writings we argue that this discussion of the performance and role of journalism points to key issues in the contemporary journalistic field. This meta-discourse sees journalism as a central arena for the exercise of political power, particularly investigative journalism, and the notion of the whistleblower, revealing a set of different field relations. The debates highlight source protection, which is under increased threat in many countries. Moreover, in the aftermath of the revelations, we also witness a strained relationship between editors and reporters, both in the UK and US press. The article analyses how the Snowden debate ignited the issue of the professional roles between advocacy and objectivity, inherently contradictory within the field, between ideals of defending the marginalized and of ‘mirroring society’. Finally, the article demonstrates how professionals and other public actors are triggered to reflect more on the state of the art of journalism itself.

This article aims to explore the impact of contemporary surveillance measures on journalistic work, in particular, in the context of protecting journalistic sources of information. Such protection is considered necessary to guarantee the free flow of information and enable journalists to appropriately fulfil their ‘public watchdog’ role. Thus, the use of surveillance technology to compromise the confidentiality of sources affects freedom of expression, but it also influences the observance of other human rights, such as the right to privacy. This article analyses both legal and practical aspects of the application of surveillance measures with respect to journalists. First, it reflects on the legal standards for protecting journalistic sources in the digital age and on the new legal developments weakening source protection in those countries. Second, it examines selected instances when journalists were subject to surveillance in three countries: Bulgaria, Poland and Romania.

With the growing use of the Internet, companies are increasingly collecting and using personal data for commodifying purposes, resulting in both benefits and privacy risks for users and raising the issue of corporate surveillance. The present article investigates people’s attitudes towards corporate collection of personal data, discusses possible reasons for attitude results in relation to self-regulation, trust and media context, and compares these findings with results from the previous year. The study is based on a survey using a large-n probability sample of the Swedish population. The results are in accordance with the suggested privacy paradox: the majority of the population, as in the previous year, have negative attitudes towards corporate collection of their data, largely independent of context. Nonetheless, they continue to share their data without making any great effort to secure their privacy. Whether this depends on inexperience, ignorance or resignation, everyday corporate surveillance does not meet expectations regarding the just governing of informational privacy. As the results showed that the more positive people were towards sharing their data in various contexts, the more positively this affected their attitudes towards the fact that the data were being used by the collecting companies for various purposes, balancing out the power differences online would benefit not only users but also companies to a great extent.