Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Imaginations of Datafied Living: The New Constructed Nature of Everyday Life

Sun, May 27, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton Old Town, Floor: M, Mozart I

Abstract

Future ‘technological’ developments do not just ‘come’ into existence. Far from it – sometimes decades will pass before transformations become tangible within a social domain where they are imagined as possible futures (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). This is also the case for datafied living. While such imagined futures are not typically realized in accordance with their original vision, they offer an overall orientation for more general practices dedicated to transformation and change. As part of this orientation, imagined futures already have an influence on the contemporary everyday and effectively open up and shape avenues for actual future developments and the future present. This interrelation is discussed with particular force in the discourse on the development of media technologies (Castells, 2001; Rid, 2017; Streeter, 2010; Turner, 2006). Starting from there, the paper presents two more detailed case studies on datafied living is imagined (or not imagined), developing them towards a broader reflection on how the nature of a datafied everyday life is constructed: imagination of datafied living in pioneer communities and in corporate ‘big data’ discourses. The first ethnographic case study focuses the pioneer communities of the Quantfied Self and Maker movement. Both pioneer communities have their origins in the Bay Area around San Francisco and became active across North America, Europe and parts of Asia. But their globalized activities work differently. Combining interview data with a discourse analysis, this case study asks which imaginations of datafied living are constructed within these pioneer communities and how far are they an object of a transnational media coverage. The second contrasting case study analyses dominant corporate discourses about ‘big data’ (from the World Economic Forum, OECD, major consulting firms and leading players in health and education). It argues that the dominant discourse tends to naturalize the existence of data as a resource, covering over completely the social practices which enable data to be extracted from individuals without their consent. This generates a major tension within ‘datafied living’ between the claims made for the social benefits of data extraction and the power asymmetries which data install into the very heart of daily life.

Authors