Professor Mark Andrejevic’s sobering interview on surveillance and privacy issues is a highlight of WPCC‘s latest issue on ‘Redesigning or Redefining Privacy‘ where he expresses the concern that ‘monitoring technology is becoming so pervasive, so comprehensive, and so reliant upon the information and communication systems of everyday life’ that a total surveillance society may be unavoidable without a change of course.

He notes to interviewer and issue co-editor Pinelopi Troullinou that ‘information-based rationalization of almost every sphere of social existence’ is in the offing and that the Internet of Things is, ‘not the logical outgrowth of a drive for interactivity: it is a strategy for control and rationalization.’ Research’s challenge he adds ‘is to provide ways of understanding the long and short term consequences of data driven social sorting (and its automation)’.

The full text of the interview may be read on the WPCC website.

‘Redesigning or Redefining Privacy’ a special issue of Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture is co-edited with editorial by Shabnam Moinipour and Pinelopi Troullinou  and is published 31 October 2017.

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