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.