[Commlist] CFP: Global Media and China Special Issue: Surveillance Capitalism

Call for Papers - *Abstracts due 31st May 2020*

*Surveillance Capitalism* - Special Issue of /Global Media and China/

Guest Editor: Professor John Ellis, Royal Holloway University of London

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.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words in length, plus a short 
author bio-notes to Professor John Ellis Royal Holloway University of 
London at (john.ellis /at/ rhul.ac.uk) <mailto:(john.ellis /at/ rhul.ac.uk)> by 31st 
May 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 15th June 2020.

Important dates:

_31st May 2020_ - abstracts and authors’ bio-notes

_15th June 2020_ - notifications of abstract acceptance

_15th November 2020_ - full paper submission

_31st December 2020 _- notifications of peer-review results

_31 March 2021_ - submission of final revised paper

*June 2021 special issue published*

Please note than acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee 
publication. All submissions will undergo double blind peer review once 
completed articles are submitted.




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