The effect of the Pandemic on European Narratives on Smart Cities and Surveillance

Mikolaj Biesaga, Anna Domaradzka, Magdalena Roszczynska-Kurasinska, Szymon Talaga and Andrzej Nowak

No mnzwx, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This paper presents the analysis of European smart city narratives and how they evolved under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. We approach the smart city concept from the critical perspective of surveillance capitalism, as proposed by Zuboff, to highlight the growing privacy concerns related to technological development. We have collected and analysed 184 articles regarding smart city solutions, published on social media by five European journals between 2017 and 2021. We adopted both human and machine coding processes for qualitative and quantitative analysis of our data. As a result, we identified the main actors and four dominant narratives: regulation of AI and facial recognition, technological fight with the climate emergency, contact tracing apps, and the potential of 5G technology to boost the digitalisation processes. Our analysis shows the growing number of positive narratives underlining the importance of technology in fighting the pandemic and mitigating the climate emergency. Although the discourse on surveillance is often accompanied by the consideration of the right to privacy, those types of concerns are central for only two topics out of the four we discovered. We found that the main rationale for the development of surveillance technologies relates to the competitiveness of the EU in the global technological rivalry, rather than increasing societal wellbeing or safeguarding the transparency of new policies.

Date: 2021-12-04
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/61aa3fd4c7d9fb053feb3f6d/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:mnzwx

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/mnzwx

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().