Don't @ me: surveillance, subject formation, and the digital information economy

This thesis interrogates processes of digital subject production within the contemporary context of increasingly widespread and networked systems of U.S. state and corporate surveillance. Starting with an analysis of corporate datamining practices in mainstream social media spaces, I argue that users’ digital consumptive labor undergoes processes of commodification that function to essentialize and perpetuate hegemonic constructions of identity categories. I then examine the ways in which the U.S. government deploys post- 9/11 “war on terror” discourses to justify the use of biometric surveillance technologies and the appropriation of private sector surveillance data and resources as regulatory mechanisms in order to identify, isolate, and criminalize deviant and dissenting bodies while simultaneously producing docile, patriotic, and neoliberal digital subjects. Finally, I explore how this surveillant assemblage surrounding digital consumption, social media spaces, and the growing information economy produce essentialized notions of physical embodiment in ways that attempt to solidify categories of identity across gender, race, class, and ability; thereby foreclosing potential understandings of contextual, situated, and hybrid identities, subjectivities, and expressions, and limiting the possibility for social recognition and relationality across difference.