From market capitalism to surveillance capitalism ..

Surveillance capitalism is a term first introduced by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney in Monthly Review and later popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance. ^{- wikipedia.org}

During the dawn of the automobile age, we had Ford capitalizing on the concept of Mass Production and benefiting from it, building plants and dominating the world by means of the products that came out of these assembly factories.

Nowadays we see a similar revolution of a new economy and power centre, this time though not with physical assets or products, rather with access to tools that can collect vast volumes of data and then analyse / process them to generate information that could be used for the benefit of society or otherwise.

What does Google do to all the data it collects on all our physical and virtual life movements ? If we have an Android phone or a Google phone, all our movements are tracked to the minutest detail and monetized.

Click here to find how Google gets our complete data and monetizes on it .. 

The technologies to capture data and the tools to analyse this data have helped us move from the centuries old Market Capitalism model to the new Surveillance Capitalism model ..

Click here for the article - The new Surveillance Capitalism

The Harvard academic Zoshana Zuboff has been at the forefront of research to understand the dynamics of surveillance capitalism and has come up with exciting papers, the more important one titled - Big Other - Surveillance Capitalism and the prospect of an Information Civilization

Hope this field emerges stronger over the years with sufficient research and knowledge to understand how data will influence our lives in the future.

George..

Reference :
1. Zuboff, Shoshana. "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization." Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (March 2015): 75–89.