Spencer Revoy

2019- Spencer Revoy is a cultural and media theorist who is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. He received a BA with Honours in Cultural Studies and an MA in Theory, Culture and Politics, both from Trent University. His MA thesis examined the structure of Facebook’s surveillance program through a re-evaluation of Foucault’s Panopticon, Deleuzian schizoanalysis, and Zygmunt Bauman’s philosophy of liquid modernity. He continues this line of research by examining sites and spaces of surveillance through a highly interdisciplinary lens, with an emphasis on understanding the cultural effects of ubiquitous online surveillance.

Currently, his research interests include: critically evaluating the design of mobile interfaces, especially the paradigm of “user-friendliness”; the application of Deleuzian philosophy to questions of surveillance on the Internet, especially the question of the Internet’s ontology; and the politics of friendship as influenced by social media. He is particularly interested in how processes of “becoming friends” and “being friends” are affected by social media’s pervasive conditions of surveillance and commodification.