[Commlist] CFP: Surveillance Capitalism, Global Media & China special issue

CALL FOR PAPERS GLOBAL MEDIA & CHINA, SPECIAL ISSUE ON ‘SURVEILLANCE 
CAPITALISM’ Recent issues of Global Media and China have explored the 
specifically Chinese characteristics of internet services, involving a 
particular constellation of companies and services that is distinct from 
those developed in the USA. How do the particular affordances of the 
dominant Chinese internet services differ from those of Google, Amazon, 
Facebook and PayPal? The combination of financial information of 
personal data that WeChat now has is very different from that held by 
any Western corporation, where payment systems are separated from social 
networking systems. Indeed, Facebook’s recent attempt to launch a 
payment system similar to that of WeChat seems to have failed for a 
variety of reasons, including its potential to destabilise the Western 
banking system. It is now time for comparative studies and the 
development of an overview of the different constellations that have 
developed. Debates in the West are developing around the nature of the 
privatisation of online services in the age of big data and the intent 
of things. Two events have accelerated this debate. The first is the 
growing concern around the misuse of data about individuals and its 
potential for influencing behaviour, evidenced by the rise of ‘fake 
news’ in social media and the scandal round Facebook and Cambridge 
Analytica. Data on specific individuals who might be susceptible to 
influence was, in this case, used to target them with specific Facebook 
advertising messages in an attempt to influence their voting behaviour 
in both the Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump. The 
second event is the publication of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of 
Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff provides a powerful, Marxist influenced, 
critique of the behaviour of internet giants of the USA, and their 
repurposing of the web from its initial idealistic public service 
direction. Zuboff’s critique is directed towards the huge scale of the 
internet corporations and their denial of any public responsibility for 
their actions. She discusses the rights and responsibilities of these 
giant private corporations in dealing with user data. They sell this 
predictive data to companies who “want to know the maximum they can 
extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we behave in order 
to know how best to intervene in our behaviour”. Zuboff’s critique is a 
powerful one, but she scarcely mentions China at all. Given that China’s 
internet giants are also private corporations devoted to the pursuit of 
profit, can it be said that China is developing a different model to the 
Surveillance Capitalism identified by Zuboff, or is it broadly similar? 
Indeed, is Zuboff’s model applicable to the Chinese situation at all? 
This call for papers for a special issue of Global Media and China 
invites both specific case studies and more general overview articles in 
order to open a debate about the specifics of the different ways in 
which Western and Chinese enterprises have implemented the affordances 
of the internet and digital information management. Guest Editor: 
Professor John Ellis, Royal Holloway University of London Abstract 
submission deadline: 31st May,2020 Decision for abstract: 15th June,2020 
Full manuscript submissions: Before 15th November .
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