Digital Culture & Society (DCS)

Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of capitalist exploitation for some time. From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic - the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In this issue, the contributors show how participation and commodification are closely linked to the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

Olga Moskatova is an assistant professor for media studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her fields of research include theory and aesthetics of visual media, materiality of media, networked images and media of immunization. Anna Polze is pursuing her PhD. at the Research Training Group "Documentary Practices" at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Ramón Reichert (Dr. phil.) works as a European project researcher at the University of Lancaster within the Erasmus+ program. He is the program director of the M.Sc. Data Studies at Danube University Krems, Austria. He is a lecturer at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a lecturer in Contextual Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.