Call for papers #47 Special issue: Communication and Surveillance

Call for papers #47 

Special issue: Communication and Surveillance

Submissions are due on October 31st, 2021

The special issue will be published on June 2023

 

Guest editors #47: 

Gabriela Gómez Rodríguez, Universidad de Guadalajara, México. Email: gabriela.grodriguez@academicos.udg.mx 

Rodrigo González Reyes, Universidad de Guadalajara, México.  Email: rodrigo@suv.udg.mx

 

Scope

At the end of the 18th century, English philosopher and lawyer, Jeremy Bentham (Foucault, 2022) came up with an architecture design allowing a wide overview of the whole space of human interaction. Bentham called it the “panopticon”. Although the panopticon wasn’t very popular as a construction design despite there were a few attempts of implementing it around the globe, the concept immediately gained traction as a symbolic construct in modern societies, as the standard and ideal to achieve public safety based upon the complete control over the surroundings. 

 

Later, with the incoming 20th century and two world wars in which spying, cryptography, and telecommunications interventions were key in their development, such technologies became more and more sophisticated and were at the core of the Cold War. Under that period, the development and improvement of satellite technology, the widening and globalization of telephone, and the practices of video-surveillance contributed to the perception of becoming citizens under constant watching. On the other hand, governments joined a global race to be first and better in developing and improving powerful systems of surveillance with both domestic and international scope. The Big Brother that Orwell warned in his dystopian novel 1984 was very likely to become true. 

 

The development of the internet, and the ubiquity and widening of digital communication have fueled and cemented the perception that we are living under constant scrutiny. We can trace the trail of a state of vigilance to the design of the Echelon system, in the 1990s, to the boom of the deep web to evade it. These and other traces demonstrate the current state of affairs regarding surveillance technologies; a situation that is pervasive as well as disturbing. 

 

Under such historical and technological frame and until nowadays, considering algorithms and technologies of geolocalization, cyber biometrics and facial recognition technologies, several authors as Reg Whitaker (2000), Evgeny Morozov (2012), and Shoshana Zuboff (2020) have warned about the threats over privacy and intimacy, as well as the ongoing development of a society of surveillance and a capitalism of vigilance. 

 

This special issue of Comunicación y Medios about the multiple and complex intersections of communications and surveillance aims to contribute to inform a situated debate about the problem, with particular -but not exclusive- attention to Iberoamerica. The focus of this special issue is the theoretical, epistemological, and ethical discussion under an historical framework such as the one described. That is, a moment when different organizations (from governments to corporations to criminal organizations), with the power of funding technologies of monitoring, are deploying a wide control over citizens. The field of communication research must urgently address the role and scope of these problems and challenges in its agenda, especially in a context where new, mobile, and digital technologies are speeding up. 

 

Some questions informing the special issue are the following: To what extent and how datafication of daily life promotes new ways of surveillance? What are the odds and limitations of new forms of surveillance? What are the possibilities and limitations of cybersecurity facing the process of increasing algorithmization? What are the specific features of online, offline, and on life surveillance? How and to what extent platformization, as a key component of the digital economy, becomes a new scenario of surveillance? What new settings appear within a society of vigilance? 

 

Topics on Communication and Surveillance include, but they are not limited to:

1. Algorithms and cybersecurity 
2. Datafication and new forms of surveillance
3. Online, offline, and a life under surveillance
4. Platformization and digital economy of surveillance vigilance
5. Re-configurations of a society of surveillance
6. Methodologies in researching a society under surveillance
7. Methodological perspectives to study cybersecurity and surveillance in Latin America

 

Original papers in English and Spanish are welcomed. Check author guidelines available here.

 

Comunicación y Medios is indexed in Clarivate (WoS) - ESCI; SciELO-Chile; DOAJ; ERIH PLUS; Latindex; Dialnet; REDIB; CLASE; MIAR; Latinoamericana; LatinREV

 

General Editor: Tomás Peters tpeters@uchile.cl

Editor: Claudia Lagos Lira cllagos@uchile.cl

References:

Foucault, M. (2002). Vigilar y castigar: nacimiento de la prisión. Siglo XXI Editores.

Morozov. E. (2012). The Net Delusion. Penguin.

Whitaker, R. (2000). The end of privacy. New press.

Zuboff, S. (2020). The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs.