Intimacy Under Surveillance: Digital Lives and Algorithmic Control in Contemporary Global Fiction _ A Study of Selected Novels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17605/cajssh.v7i2.1305Keywords:
Surveillance, Intimacy, Digital Culture, Algorithmic Control, Biopolitics, PrivacyAbstract
This paper explores narratives of intimacy in contemporary fiction: How do algorithms and digital surveillance shape the construction of intimacy in fiction? I draw upon Shoshana Zuboff’s notion of surveillance capitalism and Michel Foucault’s thinking on biopolitics to focus on the novels Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), and Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2020). Everyone delves into love, privacy, and home life, whilst everything is being monitored. By employing close reading, the paper demonstrates how our emotions are re-engineered and float beyond us towards data points. In my opinion, these novels expose a new affective politics of social media where being seen is synonymous with being good, and the human relation is always mediated. They reflect how chaotic and tricky moral matters get for the casual user of technology.
References
S. Zuboff, "The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a," A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 2019.
G. Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," in Surveillance, crime and social control: Routledge, 2017, pp. 35-39.
L. Berlant, Cruel optimism. Duke university press, 2020.
J. Gagnon, "Seeing Everything: The Circle and the Transparency Paradox," Journal of Digital Culture Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 112–127, 2018.
N. Wood, "Surveillance and Vulnerability in Arundhati Roy’s "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” " Contemporary South Asian Literature Review, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 58–75, 2021.
M. Foucault, "The history of sexuality volume I," in Feminist Studies: Routledge, 1978, pp. 61-66.
D. Eggers, The circle. Penguin UK, 2013.
M. Foucault, "panopticism" from" discipline & punish: The birth of the prison," Race/Ethnicity: multidisciplinary global contexts, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-12, 2008.
M. Álvarez, "Eyes Without Faces: Surveillance and Empathy in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes," World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 34–40, 2022.
D. Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
M. Andrejevic, Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge, 2013.
N. Couldry and U. A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
B. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
H. Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
C. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016.
