Citizen Sensing; From Technology to Activism

• In Event: Tensions and Challenges for Environmental Citizen Science I: Scientization of Activism

Abstract

Citizen monitoring of air pollution using low-cost sensors is a global phenomenon, with active groups in Barcelona, London, Amsterdam, among others, and in several states in the United States. These projects often explicitly seek to connect data and collective action by citizens on local environmental policies.

However, is this linkage actually playing out in citizen science practices? Are citizen sensors, in fact, using sensor’ data to fight for policy change? Our findings from the empirical analysis are decidedly pessimistic. We looked at an extensive data-set of longitudinal online forum data from two global projects, supplemented with interviews and surveys of citizen sensing project principals, forum moderators, and citizen users, and employed automated analysis and graphing tools.

Two findings are emerging, and both are sobering: first, while big data from the sensors have an indisputable weightiness as an empirical “object” (following Heidegger, Ingold, Latour) set “over against” the material world, the status of this data as a “thing”, as a leaky armature for instigating collective action in the social world is yet to emerge. Second, modeling the topics of users’ online posts and their evolution over time overwhelmingly suggests “objectification” of sensor data, and of “pollution” itself, as indexed by the homogenous and scientized discursive categories addressed in the posts.

Furthermore, analysis of forum threads suggests that objectification may produce highly centralized social network patterns marked by strictly instrumental many-to-one exchanges between users and developers. Our findings highlight the challenges facing data-driven citizen science projects, in contrast to projects where pollution is a clear and present problem, purporting to mobilize activism for clean air.

Authors

• Ehsan Sabaghian, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

• Sikana Tanupabrungsun, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

• Murali Venkatesh, School Of Information Studies, Syracuse University

• Manali Paresh Shiurkar, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

• Harsh Manoj Avlani, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University