Eat as Much as You Can, Even if You Don't Want to: Streaming as a Practice of Surveillance Capitalism
Maciej Ożóg
maciej.ozog@filologia.uni.lodz.plUniversity of Lodz (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2678-0722
Abstract
Streaming is widely understood to be the most effective, accessible, convenience-oriented technology for providing audiovisual texts to its users. Its importance, especially since the pandemic, is dynamically increasing. The status of streaming media as a growing player in the audiovisual market, expressed in revenues and in user numbers, makes it necessary to critically reflect on its impact on contemporary culture. The author proposes a look at streaming media as one of the elements of a broad economic-political-cultural system described by Shoshana Zuboff as surveillance capitalism. The analysis focuses on streaming-specific mechanisms, techniques, strategies, and tactics for enforcing power, which manifest themselves in the specific positioning of users within the relationship of dependencies constituting the network of instrumental power characteristic of streaming.
Keywords:
streaming, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic culture, instrumental powerReferences
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Authors
Maciej Ożógmaciej.ozog@filologia.uni.lodz.pl
University of Lodz Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2678-0722
PhD, a theoretician of culture, media and sound artist, curator. He has published a number of articles on the aesthetics and history of new media art, the history and theory of avant-garde film, video art, and experimental music. Author of the book Życie w krzemowej klatce. Sztuka nowych mediów jako krytyczna analiza praktyk cyfrowego nadzoru [Living in a Silicon Cage: New Media Art as a Critical Analysis of Digital Surveillance] (2018). His research focuses on interactive art, tactical media, bio art, network society, surveillance studies, and posthumanism.
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