SURVEILLANCE, AGENCY, AND CONTROL: RETHINKING SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN PAKISTAN THROUGH A DATA COLONIALISM LENS

Abstract

This study reconceptualizes social media use in Pakistan through the intersecting lenses of data colonialism, surveillance capitalism, and postcolonial theory, with particular attention to the dynamics of surveillance, user agency, and structural control. While dominant discourses frame social media platforms as emancipatory spaces that democratize information and expand civic participation, this paper argues that these same platforms function simultaneously as sophisticated infrastructures of data extraction and behavioral governance. Drawing primarily on Couldry and Mejias's (2019) theory of data colonialism, Zuboff's (2019) framework of surveillance capitalism, and postcolonial scholarship on global digital inequality (Kwet, 2019; Said, 1978), we develop a theoretically integrated conceptual model that situates user agency within algorithmically structured environments of asymmetrical power. Through a qualitative interpretive approach informed by platform policy analysis, digital rights discourse, and empirical insights drawn from extant studies of Pakistani digital users and practices, we identify and analyze three interrelated dynamics: (1) the normalization of pervasive, multi-layered surveillance; (2) the emergence of what we theorize as bounded agency, a form of structurally conditioned autonomy operating within algorithmic constraints; and (3) entrenched structural dependency on transnational platform corporations that reproduces colonial logics of extraction and accumulation. Our findings suggest that user participation in social media platforms is fundamentally embedded in asymmetrical power relations in which the experience of autonomy is systematically conditioned by invisible technological and commercial structures. The paper contributes to Global South media studies and critical data studies by reframing social media use as a site of colonial continuity, advancing a structurally negotiated rather than individually possessed conception of digital agency, and outlining concrete pathways toward data justice and digital sovereignty in Pakistan.