Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Networks and resistance

Electronic data

  • 3283-5593-2-PB

    Rights statement: © The authors, 2009 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

    Final published version, 495 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND

Links

View graph of relations

Networks and resistance: investigating online advocacy networks as a modality for resisting state surveillance

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2009
<mark>Journal</mark>Surveillance and Society
Issue number3
Volume6
Number of pages26
Pages (from-to)233-258
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper explores the network of relationships that emerge from the online activities of privacy advocates. It argues that this advocacy network, through its linking practices, may potentially become a network of meta-surveillance that has the potential to transcend the agency of the individual actors. By reducing the degrees of separation between the actors, through their linking practices, the network can foster links between different sets of data, create links between information about incidents, corroborate information (making it more credible), direct the attention of the public and the traditional media to particular state
surveillance practices, and so forth. Through these linking practices the network can draw upon the emergent positive network externalities to realise an information politics that is beyond what any single actor can achieve. Through the use of social network analysis and a webometrics methodology (supported by web-based crawling applications) we attempt to reveal this emerging online advocacy network. Through our data collection and analysis we show that the online advocacy network seems somewhat fragmented with a relatively small but stable, and geographically biased, core. This tentative analysis and conclusion
may have important implications for the way privacy advocates view their online practices.

Bibliographic note

© The authors, 2009 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.