ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some key issues arising from the use and experience of media in the digital era. It suggests that digital media, as forms of visibility, commodity, and power, pose some important opportunities/risks for rights discourses and practices that require further empirical analysis. The spread of networked digital devices (NDD) enables new modes of political representation and mobilisation to organically emerge that hold diverse power brokers to account, but in the course of seeking convenience and connectivity technovisuals have traded their anonymity and privacy. The rapid diffusion of NDD into the social world has profoundly transformed the nature and means of communication and everything that goes with it, from the mechanics of work and consumption to the dynamics of politics and criminality. Beyond affording services and pleasures to users, NDD double up as visibility-producing dispositifs of surveillance: exposing the bodies of people to the gaze of the few and the many.
