BP 7: Netflix, Automation, and Entertainment Surveillance

“Top Picks for Naila”

Have you ever logged onto someone else’s Netflix profile and found options you would have never seen on your average Netflix profile? You’ve become so used to the automated possibilities that it becomes odd to see someone else’s “personal” algorithm displayed to you. This is a form of entertainment surveillance that has directed our society to automation.

I chose to take a picture of my smart TV with Netflix displayed to present the idea of entertainment and capitalistic surveillance. Surveillance capitalism provides services to billions of people where the providers of those services can monitor the behavior of the users. Behavioral data is monitored on many platforms, most commonly on Facebook and Google, but even our streaming sources, such as Netflix, contain algorithms to categorize and divide individuals into a box. Netflix’s interface has a built-in algorithm that personalizes shows and movie recommendations by predicting how much a user would like the show or movie. Surveillance became the business model of the internet and mass entertainment. In John Naughton’s article about Zuboff’s new book on the surveillance business model, he states, “Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalization,” although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.” Essentially, Netflix replaces the personal aspect of “you” with automation and digitalization. You are becoming a part of automation as Netflix puts you into the category they think you belong to.

Greg Elmer talks about panoptic surveillance, which makes exercising power and control more efficient through a subtle form of coercion. Foucault uses Bentham’s surveillance theory to present the concept of “a subtle form of coercion, a routinized political and economic subservience that produces docile subjects.” Netflix users are a part of the economic subservience as they subconsciously exercise the willingness to follow automation unquestionably. When Netflix uses the personal data of the media you are watching, they thrive economically with the help of us, the “watched.” Rather than having coercion through fear-mongering, such as George Orwell’s 1984 concept of “Big Brother is watching you,” who was a character that represented surveillance and control in a totalitarian government, Netflix achieves a more effective form of social control through modulation. It accomplishes the docility of individuals and all other elements that make up the system of a subtle, disciplinary political society.

Using your data and information found on their platform, Netflix has personalized a profile of selections for you to watch and excludes other options if it doesn’t fit their own narrative for you. The data you provide benefits them economically, and society becomes segregated into two groups: “the watcher and the watched.”