Advancing the hegemony of surveillance capitalism: A critical discourse analysis of surveillance representations in media

Abstract

The rise in popularity of consumer electronics with surveillant capabilities e.g., fitness trackers, networked appliances, video doorbells, and voice activated personal assistants, illustrates a concerning phenomenon: an expansion of the surveillance state. In conjunction with these consumer products there is an underlying economic system, surveillance capitalism – a meshing of the logics of capitalism and surveillance – which works in an often-unseen manner propelling forward a scheme which dismantles the privacy rights of individuals, perpetuates discrimination, and erodes democratic norms and rules. Most broadly, this dissertation interrogates how surveillance is sold in advertising and news media and examines the roles each have in fostering individuals to succumb to persistent surveillance. To answer this question, a corpus of texts was assembled containing approximately 300 items, produced from 2017 through 2019, found in advertising and journalism and related to various surveillant consumer products. Then, through extensive critical discourse analysis of the data, three unique themes emerged which are deployed to sustain the hegemony of surveillance capitalism: fear, optimization, and weightless criticism. These themes are examined closely, and examples are brought forth in individual chapters. The analysis also reveals and explores a complex set of economic pressures which force news journalism in particular to become complicit in, rather than confront, surveillance capitalism. Moreover, in the conclusion a lifecycle of surveillance in media products is developed to illustrate what is driving and sustaining the hegemony of this economic system. This research asserts the need for an unyielding aggressive discourse from news journalism against surveillance and surveillance capitalism more broadly.