New Seminar Series: Corporate surveillance and its impact on society – dystopian future of privacy

25 OCTOBER 2022, 2.30 PM

Dr. Joanna Strycharz
Amsterdam School of Communication Research
University of Amsterdam

Dr. Anna Turner
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
Polish Academy of Sciences

Dynamically progressing digitization has accustomed us to the fact that technological determinism is imperceptibly becoming another dimension of social and cultural life. The reality that surrounds us is increasingly “smart”, shortening the distance between our desire and its realization to just one click. Corporate surveillance represents the dangerous face of digital revolutions: the extreme concentration of knowledge and power poses challenges to the future of our privacy, decision-making, choices and, more broadly, social solidarity and democracy. Digital giants are masterfully honing their skills to create virtual reality so that we see it in an exciting perspective and spend as much time as possible in it. What we, as inhabitants of this world, want to keep to ourselves is losing meaning: as we search for and share information online, we lose control of both the question and the answer. We are moving in a new global culture of post-privacy forced to operate under digital surveillance.

During the seminar and workshop we want to discuss the consequences of the current formation and transformation of cyberspace and the directions of its evolution for the individual user, for the community and for the researcher of social phenomena, as well as for online and traditional corporations, whose business model based on “surveillance capitalism” has become a sign of our times, times condemned for hedonistic materialism.

Dr. Joanna Strycharz is an Assistant Professor of persuasive communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research and Co-Director of the Digital Communication Methods Lab at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on how insights gained from data can be used to adjust communication between organizations and consumers. She is also interested in how data-driven communication impacts cognitions, attitudes, and behavior of consumers, and what unintended effects such communication has on individuals and the society. In 2020, Joanna was named an emerging scholar for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and her research has been published in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, and Computers in Human Behavior, among others.

Dr. Anna Turner is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a GSSR alumna. Her research interests include the impact of new technologies on society, with particular focus on privacy and surveillance. Anna is passionate about quantitative methods, including the use of online data in the social sciences. She also has over a decade of experience in digital marketing, gained while working for key clients at a leading internet marketing agency in Poland.

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