ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on emotional responses and potential impacts of datafication experienced through everyday interactions with technologies that generate data about the body. This includes practices not explicitly targeting emotion (e.g. capture of social media data). Studies of surveillance have tended to focus on the technical and operational capacities of technologies such as CCTV, as well as those whose primary purpose is not explicitly surveillance, for instance, understanding the quantity and quality of data captured by big tech companies, along with their use of data (Marshall, 2012). Critical theory has claimed that new digital technologies have facilitated the commodification of information (Thrift, 2005) and that we are increasingly living in societies of information (Crang & Graham, 2007). This work has coalesced into the field of surveillance studies, which has broadened its scope beyond the traditional visual forms of CCTV surveillance to the idea that digital technologies have facilitated new forms of surveillance through the capture, storage, and use of data generated from individuals’ private lives (Ball et al., 2006; Ellis et al., 2016; Lyon, 1994, Marx, 2007). This ranges from governmental and organisational data capture (e.g. big tech companies) through to social media facilitating new ways for individuals to watch each other (so called peer-to-peer surveillance (Andrejevic, 2002).
