Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media [Hardcover]

This book explores commodification processes of personal data and provides a critical framing of the ongoing debate of privacy in the Internet age, using the example of social media and referring to interviews with users. It advocates and expands upon two main theses: First, peoples privacy is structurally invaded in contemporary informational capitalism. Second, the best response to this problem is not accomplished by invoking the privacy framework as it stands, because it is itself part of the problematic nexus that it struggles against. Informational capitalism poses weighty problems for making the Internet a truly social medium, and aspiring to sustainable privacy simultaneously means to struggle against alienation and exploitation. In the last instance, this means opposing the capitalist form of association  online and offline.

1. Introduction  2. The Empirical Study: Critical Social Research on Social Media  3. Privacy in Informational Capitalism  4. Privacy Theories  5. Privacy and Ideology  6. Alternatives.  Appendix.

Grounded in qualitative empirical research about social media users' attitudes towards privacy and surveillance issues, this book contributes to a critical theory of information capitalism by exploring the commodification of privacy and personal data, providing a critical framing of the ongoing debate over privacy in the internet age.Sebastian Sevignani is a member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria, and Assistant Professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jenas Department of Sociology, Germany.

Private sphere, private property, private data, private investors, private concerns, private initiative, private schools and education - capitalism is obsessed with the private and with possessive individualism. Sebastian Sevignani shows in Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media how digital capital£,