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The chapter critically analyzes the concepts and the practices of surveillance in modern and postmodern societies along with their consequences. We show the changes in the systems, which are used to monitor individuals, and emphasize the transition toward soft surveillance systems, probably stimulated by digital technologies. This switch from top-down control to “lateral” monitoring systems encloses surveillance practices with suggestive names like interveillance, synopticon, and dataveillance. The dark side of digital health has a bright start. According to Topol’s (2016) vision of the future, we will soon be the “consumers,” the real protagonists, of the management of our health – thanks largely to the practically endless data about our bodies, behaviors, and lifestyles we will be able to collect and analyze. We will share our health information in real time with the doctors whom we will choose based on their score in clinical rankings (here, too, quantification rears its head). Yet, this simplified version of health makes it seem that there are always some solutions, which the algorithm can supply as long as it has enough information. Moreover, in the United States, some health-insurance companies have started to offer a discount on premiums to the members who agree to collect and share self-tracking data with them. Clearly, the discount is given only to the workers who have healthy habits. At first sight, this can seem as a win-win trade-off; however, what today is presented as an individual option can easily become a requirement tomorrow.

The study explores the use of video to document police interaction with citizens and its role in the renaissance of a contemporary crisis focused on police use-of-force, race relations, and legitimacy in the United States. The saturation of communication technologies and network access have ushered an era of citizens watching the police, consolidating the new visibility of policing and potentially reorganizing to some degree the power dynamics of traditional police/community relations.

The argument is supported through a triangulated analysis that draws on several data sources about video technology use by both citizens and police, media coverage of police shootings, and public opinion on trends in police excessive force.

The institution of policing is experiencing a legitimacy crisis that is fueled by high-profile police shootings of African Americans by white police officers captured by video technology. The public increasingly expects access to video of police/citizen encounters, which redefines the public’s role in police accountability matters as well as the consequences for police legitimacy.

The theory illuminates the ways in which video has become central to public and official discourse in police use-of-force cases and the problems its presence and absence presents in police/community relations. The ability of citizens to record and widely share video of police encounters is a new development in the ability of citizens and police reform advocates to frame the discourse on police/community relations, accountability, and legitimacy.

This paper aims to serve as an integrative literature review that organizes the burgeoning literature and findings related to possible impacts of the selfie phenomenon on consumers.

This is a conceptual paper.

The current empirical scholarly work supports two conflicting perspectives on the impact of selfies: the selfie experience as a source of empowerment and the selfie as embodiment of societal control and expression of existing power-relations. While the two perspectives are seemingly discordant, in fact, they pertain to different levels of analysis – individual and social, respectively.

While the empowerment aspect of the selfie experience has been well-documented in existing literature, the mechanisms of control and disempowerment have remained underconceptualized. This research paper offers a framework which addresses this omission and theorizes ways in which the selfie phenomenon perpetuates societal control and maintains power-relations.

The chapter uses a comparative case study design to address the mutations and trajectories of transparency in two organizations. We chose organizations that are similar in that they favor extensive forms of self-disclosure, but also different in terms of which sector they inhabit, audiences, and organization type: the Pirate Party of Germany and the lobby organization Epsilon. The findings, in close dialog with different threads in the transparency literature, unveil three crucial dimensions in which transparency regimes are likely to trigger unintended consequences: first, organizations have to cope with the tension between the disclosure of internal information on the one hand, and the need to appear consistent in public on the other. Second, transparency strategies can, however, turn into surveillance and trigger new forms of data ordering, sorting, and aggregating practices. Third, disclosure practices create and undermine complex hierarchies and power relations for organizational members. The comparison of the cases demonstrates that it is crucial to observe the practical implications and multiple trajectories of transparency practices.

Surveillance studies scholars have embraced Foucault's panopticon as a central metaphor in their analysis of online monitoring technologies, despite several architectural incompatibilities between eighteenth and nineteenth century prisons and twenty-first century computer networks. I highlight a number of Internet features that highlight the limits of the electronic panopticon. I examine two trends that have been considerably underestimated by surveillance scholars: (1) the democratization of surveillance, where the distributed structure of the Internet and the availability of observation technologies has blurred the distinction between those who watch and those who are being watched, allowing individuals or marginalized groups to deploy sophisticated surveillance technologies against the state or large corporations; and (2) the resistance strategies that Internet users are adopting to curb the surveillance of their online activities, through blocking moves such as the use of cryptography, or masking moves that are designed to feed meaningless data to monitoring tools. I conclude that these two trends are neglected by a majority of surveillance scholars because of biases that make them dismiss the initiative displayed by ordinary users, assess positive and negative outcomes differently, and confuse what is possible and what is probable.