iOwn You: The Dark Side of iNteractivity

iMust admit that the first two chapters of the book, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era by Mark Andrejevic was pretty  interesting, a lot of  the things that he addressed in his book, we spoke about in class. From the way companies profit from the free labor of others to the ‘stalkerish’ traits ads have started to developed, I was really intrigued by what Andrejevic was talking about.

From the two chapters, I noticed Andrejevic was pretty consistent with the argument: ‘interactivity does not mean democratization.’ In other words, interactivity is just another tactic used to make us believe in this ideology of ‘false change’ or as Andrejevic put it, “[a strategy] for monitoring and surveillance.” (Pg. 5) I agree with Andrejevic because we are constantly hearing about these new technologies that can change the world for the better and unfortunately—we believe it, we do not question its validity. In fact this is something Jaron Lanier criticized in his book, You Are Not A Gadget when he spoke criticized the ideology of these digi-geeks, who view technology as the savor of all things that need saving. I found Andrejevic’s example of TiVo as one of the technologies that he critiques; I did not view TiVo as a technology that can be used to monitor us but after hearing his argument, I began to look at TiVo as this freaky little alien monitoring our behavior then reporting back to the mother ship—in this case it is the capitalist companies.

Even more interesting, his example of how Nike uses the customization feature on their site as a way to monitor what people like so that they can produce products that fit that similar description, reminded me of the free labor discussion we had in class. Although, I understand where Andrejevic is coming I do not really see this is a big deal. I say this with caution, primarily because I do not feel we should be monitored and tracked—especially without our consent, but then again some of these traceable things enable companies to make products that we enjoy.

For Andrejevic the rise in interactivity just means the implicit loss of our freedom, because we can no longer do things online without being tracked. For example whenever we go to a website cookies are embedded into our IP Address, which allows websites to monitor what we are doing, when we are doing it, and how often we do it. One might view this as an invasion of privacy but as Andrejevic implies, we gave that up when we accepted the technology is our savor ideology.

However, as Andrejevic acknowledges in chapter 2, interactivity is not always a bad thing because it allows us to become wearier of the people we associate ourselves with. (Pg. 38-9) Although this opens the eyes of individuals to those around them, it also has the potential to cause people to question what/who is real and what/who is fake, which I do not really see as a bad thing due to the constant rise in scams and identity theft (such as, the fake profiles of celebrities people make on Facebook).