M Andrejevic
Biographic Data
| ID | 8981 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Andrejevic |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Andrejevic |
| SIGNATURE | ANDREJEVIC M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6096-1060 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 425 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The critical conscience of cultural studies
To suggest that, for those influenced by his work, Graeme modeled the critical conscience of cultural studies is to highlight these key themes in his approach: the relation of theory to meaningful practice, an abiding concern with the power relations that shape everyday life, the intellectual, ethical-moral, and civic role of higher education, and, above all, a contribution to the public good. His contributions are monumental and remain an inspir…
‘I have stopped … listening to the radio and haven't been going on any news channels online’: An analysis of media consumption patterns in Australia
Democracy depends on an information environment in which the media provide relevant news and information to citizens who are interested in public issues and willing to become knowledgeable about what is happening in society. In this article, we analyse Australians’ narratives about their daily social media use patterns. We first map media-related challenges that face democratic societies. Then we analyse, based on our original qualitative researc…
The scandal that shocked the world”: Conspirituality and online scam ads
“The scandal that shocked the world”: conspirituality and online scam ads
Banning “braingasm: An investigation of misogynistic politics in 8Chan’s, U.S. platforms’ and CCP’s regulation of ASMR
This article analyses a global attack on ASMR women producers who produce "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" videos initiated by 8Chan, U.S. platforms and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). We consider ASMR as a form of feminine labour that employs bodily and sensory effects to generate affective pleasures, and it troubles boundaries and expectations about women's social positions. The very fact that such labour became the target of 8Chan men…
The Cambridge Handbook of Facial Recognition in the Modern State
In situations ranging from border control to policing and welfare, governments are using automated facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect taxes, prevent crime, police cities and control immigration. FRT involves the processing of a person's facial image, usually for identification, categorisation or counting. This ambitious handbook brings together a diverse group of legal, computer, communications, and social and political science schola…
Computational Methods for Improving the Observability of Platform-Based Advertising
The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Meta and Alphabet, two of the dominant players in this ecosystem, have contributed significantly to industry disintermediation via the design and market dominance of their advertising systems, which in turn are symbiotic with their own business models, and feed on large amounts of consumer data gener…
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The affordances and limits of automated user-level explanation in Meta’s advertising system
Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and …
Automated responses to the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic: An overview
The pandemic response was a thoroughly mediated phenomenon – one that paired digital information technologies with automated logistical systems to address inter-related crises of circulation. In the logistical sphere, automated media were used to manage flows of people, commodities and even (in the case of ‘smart’ ventilation systems) air itself. In the media realm, automated systems played a role in circulating timely notifications and alerts an…
Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this article considers the forms of ‘environmental’ governance envisioned by those …
Automated Parasociality: From Personalization to Personification
Recent developments in AI promise to further enact the shift from personalization to personification in automated digital interfaces. We have already seen the rise of virtual influencers and, more recently, of chatbots that adopt the personas of celebrities. Drawing on the intertwined history of the relationship between parasociality and personal influence, we frame the shift toward personification as a strategy for re-centralizing control over t…
Education in an Era of Pervasive Automation
Pandemic Politics: The 2021 and 2022 German and Australian Federal Election Campaigns on Social Media
One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even…
Autoroll: Scripting the emergence of classroom facial recognition technology
This paper considers how facial recognition technology is coming to find a place in contemporary schooling. Drawing on the ‘script analysis’ approach from the field of Science and Technology Studies, the paper examines the development of a facial recognition-based classroom recognition system by an Australian start-up company – ‘AutoRoll’. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary data, the paper details the ongoing negotiations and mechanisms …
Should we embrace “Big Sister”? Smart speakers as a means to combat intimate partner violence
It is estimated that one in three women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) across the course of their life. The popular uptake of “smart speakers” powered by sophisticated AI means that surveillance of the domestic environment is increasingly possible. Correspondingly, there are various proposals to use smart speakers to detect or report IPV. In this paper, we clarify what might be possible when it comes to combatting IPV using existing o…
QR codes during the pandemic: Seamful quotidian placemaking
During the COVID-19 pandemic, one technology for contact tracing has come to dominate – QR codes. As a technology pioneered in Japan two decades ago and mainstreamed in China, QR codes have quickly become part of quotidian placemaking. While locations such as China have fully incorporated QR code technology into everyday contexts including public transport and mobile wallet applications, QR codes in the West were relatively overlooked. That was, …
Automated culture: Introduction
Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace…
Automated media and commercial populism
This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call ‘commercial populism’. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of…
Addressing the accountability gap: Gambling advertising and social media platform responsibilities
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
A necessary evil? The rise of online exam proctoring in Australian universities
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rapid but sometimes controversial take-up of 'online examination proctoring' systems by universities keen to maintain their assessment schedules during times of campus closure. Following the theoretical tradition of media 'domestication', this article examines the mainstream adoption of different online proctoring systems in Australian higher education during the first year of the pandemic. Through analysis of i…
Seeing Like a Border: Biometrics and the Operational Image
This article considers the role played by automated vision in trans- forming bodies into “operational images” that enable the expansion of borders into enclosures – and the multiplication of these enclosures. In this respect, we seek to expand on Chris Rumford’s (2011) invitation to consider what it might mean to “see like a border” (67). We argue that the iconic character of the image – as representation – is col- lapsed into its operational cha…
Meta-Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure
This article revisits the concept of the “digital enclosure” in the context of recent developments in augmented and virtual reality. It develops the notion of the “recession of the social” to consider how the platforming of a growing range of activities envisioned by the metaverse enables the governance of virtual environments in ways that foster the suppression and misrecognition of irreducible forms of societal interdependence. In so doing, it …
‘Ethical Biometrics’ and the Face of the Child: The Surveillance of Children Within Facial Recognition Industry Discourse
In this paper we analyse data gathered through facial recognition tradeshow ethnographies and interviews with members of the biometrics industry, as we consider recent shifts in industry discourse towards promoting the ‘ethical’ use of biometric technology. As the biometrics industry increasingly moves towards a ‘Video Surveillance as a Service’ (VSaaS) model, the study of facial recognition infrastructures is becoming a crucial aspect of the int…
Situating ‘careful surveillance’
In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures like the introduction of physical and social distancing, compulsory mask wearing, and contact tracin…
Shedding light on ‘dark’ ads
Targeted advertising lies at the heart of digital economic models and has been scrutinized with respect to the potential pathologies of discriminatory job and housing advertising along with concerns about harmful forms of manipulation and the invasive character of online data harvesting. This article takes as its focus the non-transparent forms of cultural association reproduced by targeted advertising. We call into question the ready distinction…
Data Civics: A Response to the “Ethical Turn”
In addition to the recent proliferation of approaches, programs, and research centers devoted to ethical data and Artifiical Intelligence, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to directly address the political question. Ethics, while crucial, comprise only an indirect response to recent concerns about the political uses and misuses of data mining, AI, and automated processes. If we are concerned about the impact of digital media on demo…
Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post- Broadcast Era
Television studies must now address a complex environment where change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly. Globalizing media industries, deregulatory policy regimes, the multiplication, convergence and trade in media formats, the emergence of new content production industries outside the US/UK umbrella, and the fragmentation of media audiences are all changing the nature of television today: i…
The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance
This article explores a range of technologies for 'lateral surveillance' or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds with an ideology of 'responsibilization' assoc…
Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans
Increasingly, online fan sites are providing instant feedback to television writers and scriptwriters, who are starting to pay more attention to the chatter of “the boards.” At the same time, the boards have become a marketing strategy for TV shows that takes advantage of interactivity to create fan communities and build viewer loyalty. Drawing on a case study of the popular web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com, this article explores the way in whi…
Automating Surveillance
This article considers the changing logics of surveillance in the era of automated data collection and processing. It argues that automation results in the emergence of post-disciplinary forms of monitoring that no longer rely on the subject’s internalization of the monitoring gaze. Such forms of monitoring do not displace other forms of surveillance but represent a new development made possible by the promise that comprehensive data collection w…
Defining the Sensor Society
The proliferation of embedded and distributed sensors marks the increasing passive-ication of interactivity. Devices such as smart phones, cameras, drones, and a growing array of environmental sensors (both fixed and mobile) and interactive online platforms have come to permeate daily life in technologically equipped societies. Consequently, we are witnessing a shift from targeted, purposeful, and discrete forms of information collection to alway…
The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother: Reality TV in the era of digital capitalism
Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time when the online economy is becoming increasingly reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The portrayal of surveillance through ‘reality TV’ as a form of entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an ‘interac…
Big Data Surveillance: Introduction
If conventional definitions of surveillance emphasize its systematic and targeted character (the notion that there is a specific "object" of surveillance), both aspects undergo some significant modifications when the goal is, generally speaking, to capture as much data as possible about everything, all the time, and hold on to it forever. [...]the ambitious scope of such surveillance raises a host of important issues associated with the infrastru…
Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction
Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy
The critical literature on commercial monitoring and so-called “free labor” (Terranova, 2000) locates exploitation in realms beyond the workplace proper, noting the productivity of networked activity including the creation of user-generated-content and the profitability of commercial sites for social networking and communication. The changing context of productivity in these realms, however, requires further development of a critical concept of e…
Nothing Comes Between Me and My CPU: Smart Clothes and ‘Ubiquitous’ Computing
The promise of interactivity is quietly but systematically undergoing a downgrade that will require a lot less activity on the part of the user - and a lot more on the dispersed 'smart' objects that will eventually populate their lives. This article reads the promotional literature on 'smart' clothes through the lens of Benjamin's discussion of fetishism and flânerie, considering the ways in which such clothes provide a mobile form of bourgeois i…
From pre-emption to slowness: Assessing the contrasting temporalities of data-driven predictive policing
Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present; a temporality of pure imminence. Yet, inheren…
Securitainment’ in the post-9/11 era
This article develops the notion of ‘securitainment’ to describe forms of popular culture that combine entertainment with instruction in managing the risks of the post-9/11 era. It argues that securitainment might be considered one example of a site in which state imperatives are offloaded onto the private sector, in keeping with emerging logics of neo-liberal governance. It uses the example of the popular Australian format, Border Security: Aust…
Smart” Cameras and the Operational Enclosure
Concerns about the impending implementation of facial recognition technology in public and shared spaces go beyond privacy to include the changing relationship between space and power. This article explores the relationship between automated identification and social sorting, decision-making, and response. To develop a theoretical framework for considering the ways in which facial recognition technology reconfigures power relations, the article c…
Monitored Mobility in the Era of Mass Customization
Just as Web browsers use information about surfing habits to customize content and advertising, so the development of mobile commerce (m-commerce) promises to capitalize on the real-time monitoring of the time-space paths followed by consumers. Thanks to the development of wireless, networked devices, gathering detailed information about consumer mobility is becoming increasingly cheap and efficient. The result is that spaces associated with leis…
Situating ‘careful surveillance’
In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures like the introduction of physical and social distancing, compulsory mask wearing, and contact tracin…
The Jouissance of Trump
Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene as the realization of the obscene figure of enjoyment that Slavoj Zizek associates with the decline of “symbolic efficiency.” The symptoms of this decline include the debunking of representation associated with a fragmented and conspiracy-theory-ridden public sphere coupled with attempts to resuscitate direct access to the “real.” Reality TV is one cultural manifestation of this combination and Trump …
Public Service Media Utilities: Rethinking Search Engines and Social Networking as Public Goods
Far from being relegated to history's dustbin by technological developments, a public service rationale is as pertinent as ever in the digital era, the capabilities of which lend themselves to the development of public service media. This article explores calls to regulate digital media platforms like Facebook and Google as public utilities, but concludes that, with the exception of regulations to facilitate user mobility and platform/network neu…
Meta-Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure
This article revisits the concept of the “digital enclosure” in the context of recent developments in augmented and virtual reality. It develops the notion of the “recession of the social” to consider how the platforming of a growing range of activities envisioned by the metaverse enables the governance of virtual environments in ways that foster the suppression and misrecognition of irreducible forms of societal interdependence. In so doing, it …
Data Civics: A Response to the “Ethical Turn”
In addition to the recent proliferation of approaches, programs, and research centers devoted to ethical data and Artifiical Intelligence, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to directly address the political question. Ethics, while crucial, comprise only an indirect response to recent concerns about the political uses and misuses of data mining, AI, and automated processes. If we are concerned about the impact of digital media on demo…
Ubiquitous Computing and the Digital Enclosure Movement
Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing tend to downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of mobile, networked interactivity. This essay seeks to supplement such accounts with a critical analysis of the emergence of digital enclosures that limit access to interactive networks and services to those who 'freely' submit to increasingly comprehensive forms of monitoring. If land enclosure helped produce the spatial conditions for th…
A necessary evil? The rise of online exam proctoring in Australian universities
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rapid but sometimes controversial take-up of 'online examination proctoring' systems by universities keen to maintain their assessment schedules during times of campus closure. Following the theoretical tradition of media 'domestication', this article examines the mainstream adoption of different online proctoring systems in Australian higher education during the first year of the pandemic. Through analysis of i…
Automated responses to the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic: An overview
The pandemic response was a thoroughly mediated phenomenon – one that paired digital information technologies with automated logistical systems to address inter-related crises of circulation. In the logistical sphere, automated media were used to manage flows of people, commodities and even (in the case of ‘smart’ ventilation systems) air itself. In the media realm, automated systems played a role in circulating timely notifications and alerts an…
Shedding light on ‘dark’ ads
Targeted advertising lies at the heart of digital economic models and has been scrutinized with respect to the potential pathologies of discriminatory job and housing advertising along with concerns about harmful forms of manipulation and the invasive character of online data harvesting. This article takes as its focus the non-transparent forms of cultural association reproduced by targeted advertising. We call into question the ready distinction…
Brain Whisperers: Cutting through the Clutter with Neuromarketing
The development of the field of neuromarketing piggybacks on growing interest in the neurosciences associated with the development of new brain imaging technology and recent theorizations of the role played by emotion in consumer decision making. Neuromarketers assert that people's bodies are, for marketing purposes, more truthful than the words they utter, promising direct access to formerly concealed aspects of consumer desire. This article sit…
Reading the Surface: Body Language and Surveillance
This article explores the role played by body language in recent examples of popular culture and political news coverage as a means of highlighting the potentially deceptive haracter of speech and promising to bypass it altogether. It situates the promise of 'visceral literacy' - the alleged ability to read inner emotions and dispositions - within emerging surveillance practices and the landscapes of risk they navigate. At the same time, it descr…
The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure
Recognizing that privacy rights are complicit in the very forms of economic monitoring and data gathering they ostensibly oppose, this essay offers a critique of corporate surveillance as a technique for exploiting the work of being watched. Consumers who submit to comprehensive surveillance in response to offers of convenience and participation perform valuable work for corporations and marketers. The model of consumer labor developed in the ess…
Works on Surveillance Cultures: Balkin and Noveck's The State of Play; Kackman's Citizen Spy; Virilio's The Original Accident; and, Fischer's Digital Shock
The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance
This article explores a range of technologies for 'lateral surveillance' or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds with an ideology of 'responsibilization' assoc…
The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother: Reality TV in the era of digital capitalism
Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time when the online economy is becoming increasingly reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The portrayal of surveillance through ‘reality TV’ as a form of entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an ‘interac…
Monitored Mobility in the Era of Mass Customization
Just as Web browsers use information about surfing habits to customize content and advertising, so the development of mobile commerce (m-commerce) promises to capitalize on the real-time monitoring of the time-space paths followed by consumers. Thanks to the development of wireless, networked devices, gathering detailed information about consumer mobility is becoming increasingly cheap and efficient. The result is that spaces associated with leis…
Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of 'Big Brother' to the increasingly important econ…
The Promise of the Digital Revolution
Between the New Medium and the Old
Survivor and Uncanny Capitalism
Access to the Real
The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother
It's All about the Experience
Rediscovering Reality
Reality TV and Voyeurism
Collaborative Review Essay: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched," by Mark Andrejevic and "Survivor Lessons: Essays on Communication and Reality Television," edited by Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. …
(2005). Collaborative Review Essay: 'Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched,' by Mark Andrejevic and 'Survivor Lessons: Essays on Communication and Reality Television,' edited by Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. Wood. Popular Communication: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 137-143
Nothing Comes Between Me and My CPU: Smart Clothes and ‘Ubiquitous’ Computing
The promise of interactivity is quietly but systematically undergoing a downgrade that will require a lot less activity on the part of the user - and a lot more on the dispersed 'smart' objects that will eventually populate their lives. This article reads the promotional literature on 'smart' clothes through the lens of Benjamin's discussion of fetishism and flânerie, considering the ways in which such clothes provide a mobile form of bourgeois i…
Interactive (In)security: The participatory promise of ready.gov
Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much Regular exercise at the gym, 3 days a week ... No longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick. (Radiohead) Shortly after
iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era
Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure
Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of networked interactivity. This essay supplements such accounts by analyzing interactive spaces as digital enclosures which restrict access to the means of interaction to those who “freely” submit to the detailed forms of monitoring that take place within them. It supplements privacy-based critiques of surveillance with questions about the ownersh…
Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans
Increasingly, online fan sites are providing instant feedback to television writers and scriptwriters, who are starting to pay more attention to the chatter of “the boards.” At the same time, the boards have become a marketing strategy for TV shows that takes advantage of interactivity to create fan communities and build viewer loyalty. Drawing on a case study of the popular web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com, this article explores the way in whi…
Ubiquitous Computing and the Digital Enclosure Movement
Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing tend to downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of mobile, networked interactivity. This essay seeks to supplement such accounts with a critical analysis of the emergence of digital enclosures that limit access to interactive networks and services to those who 'freely' submit to increasingly comprehensive forms of monitoring. If land enclosure helped produce the spatial conditions for th…
Theory Review Power, Knowledge, and Governance: Foucault's relevance to journalism studies
Interview With Graeme Turner: February 12, 2008, Brisbane, Australia
Control Over Personal Information in the Database Era
In February 2009 the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in the United Kingdom published the report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. Some have hailed this as a landmark document. The following is one of four commentaries that the editors of Surveillance & Society solicited in response to the report
Productive Play 2.0: The Logic of In-Game Advertising
Online video games are helping to pioneer the use of interactive advertising that targets consumers based on information about their behaviour, consumption patterns, and other demographic and psychographic information. This article draws on the example of in-game ads to explore some of the ways in which advertisers harness virtual worlds to marketing imperatives, and equate realism and authenticity with the proliferation of commercial messages. S…
Computer Science (49 works) · Sociology (42 works) · Political science (40 works) · Business (24 works) · Law (24 works) · Internet privacy (20 works) · Politics (16 works) · Public relations (15 works) · Computer security (14 works) · Law (14 works)