Fear of social invisibility drives user acceptance of surveillance features
Evidence
Playing to the fear of invisibility and abandonment worked in 2006, when Facebook had just 9.5 million users (and required a college e-mail address to sign up), and it has driven the acceptance of every subsequent tweak to News Feed as Facebook has amassed more than 2 billion users. News Feed grew to become the “epicenter” of the corporation’s revenue success and “the most valuable billboard on Earth,” as Time magazine stated in 2015, just three years after Facebook’s IPO. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1462
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the idea of ‘falling out of the attention stream’ as a control mechanism; parallels the general principle from earlier chapters that surveillance capitalists exploit human dependency needs. — connects to: Fear of nonexistence pressures people to participate in surveillance platforms. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1084; Perceived threat makes the public accept surveillance over privacy — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2332; Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Perceived threat makes the public accept surveillance over privacy
#corroborates(0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2332 - Fearful publics endorse broad surveillance since safety outweighs privacy
#corroborates(0.82) - Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492 - Mutual surveillance becomes the habitat within which social conformity is engineered
#expands(0.76) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1365 - Anti-terror fear normalizes demographic-focused security searching
#exemplifies(0.75) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 88 - Even imperfect invisibility can sustain the illusion of constant surveillance
#qualifies(0.72) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 303 - Uncertainty about being watched suffices to make surveillance effective
#expands(0.72) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 303