This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data.... more This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientific practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more specifically processes of datafication1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?
This article proposes the techno-cultural workshop as an innovative method for opening up the mat... more This article proposes the techno-cultural workshop as an innovative method for opening up the materiality of computational media and data flows in order to increase understanding of the socio-cultural and political-economic dimensions of datafication. Building upon the critical, creative hacker ethos of technological engagement, and the collective practice of the hackathon, the techno-cultural workshops is directed at humanities researchers and social and cultural theorists. We conceptually frame this method via Simondon as a practice-led opportunity to rethink the contested relationship between the human, nature and technology, with a view to challenging social and cultural theory that ignores the human reality of the technical object. We outline an exemplar techno-cultural workshop which explored mobile apps as i) an opportunity to use new digital tools for empirical research, and ii) as technical objects and elements for better understanding their social and cultural dimensions. We see political efficacy in the techno-cultural method not only in augmenting critical and creative agency, but as a practical exploration of the concept of data technicity, an inexhaustible relationality that exceeds the normative and regulatory utility of the data we generate and can be linked anew into collective capacities to act.
"This paper is a thoroughly updated version of our original 'Immaterial Labour 2.0' article publi... more "This paper is a thoroughly updated version of our original 'Immaterial Labour 2.0' article published in 2007 in the journal ephemera 7(1): 88-106.
Our new focus is on Facebook and we have expanded our discussion of affect, and added sections on social networks as archives (cf. Cvetkovich) and digital labour as performativity (cf. Butler). As well, this paper takes into account recent usages of social networks in revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt."
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understandi... more This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.
In this short paper we discuss our work on co-research devices with a young coder community, whic... more In this short paper we discuss our work on co-research devices with a young coder community, which help investigate big social data collected by mobile phones. The development was accompanied by focus groups and interviews on privacy attitudes and aims to explore how youth cultures are tracked in mobile phone data.
The cultural worker is a key figure in social networks, producing the vast amounts of data which ... more The cultural worker is a key figure in social networks, producing the vast amounts of data which are integral to the profits sites of sites such as Facebook. This paper develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the contradictory ways in which user-generated data both extends networks of connectivity, while simultaneously renders subjects more productive within our information economy. By theorizing the digital profile as a personal archive I want to account for the ways in which digital archives of users on-line straddle the fine line between extension and domination, or rather between a desire for connectivity and the accumulation of surplus value based on the immaterial labour of those who frequent these socially networked spaces. The archive as a conceptual framework offers a theoretical paradigm to grasp the impact social media is having on the everyday lived experiences of users participate on-line and who are ultimately rendered productive as a very specific manifestation of the cultural worker – the prosumer
This chapter considers how advertising platforms like Facebook or companies like Cambridge Analyt... more This chapter considers how advertising platforms like Facebook or companies like Cambridge Analytica leveraged vast amounts of data to produce granulated, psychographic profiles that matched American voters with targeted political messages in the recent Trump elections. In so doing, it examines the relationship between current political practices and the technological changes that have rapidly transformed advertising and marketing industries. It goes on to discuss how processes of datafication should no longer be uniquely understood as economic but also as political to garner influence, raising important questions around the myriad ways in which political parties are now using algorithmic processes to reach potential voters. The chapter concludes by considering the relevance of datafied tactics of persuasion or ‘nudge politics’, given the small margins and means by which Trump won.
This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data.... more This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientific practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more specifically processes of datafication1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?
This article proposes the techno-cultural workshop as an innovative method for opening up the mat... more This article proposes the techno-cultural workshop as an innovative method for opening up the materiality of computational media and data flows in order to increase understanding of the socio-cultural and political-economic dimensions of datafication. Building upon the critical, creative hacker ethos of technological engagement, and the collective practice of the hackathon, the techno-cultural workshops is directed at humanities researchers and social and cultural theorists. We conceptually frame this method via Simondon as a practice-led opportunity to rethink the contested relationship between the human, nature and technology, with a view to challenging social and cultural theory that ignores the human reality of the technical object. We outline an exemplar techno-cultural workshop which explored mobile apps as i) an opportunity to use new digital tools for empirical research, and ii) as technical objects and elements for better understanding their social and cultural dimensions. We see political efficacy in the techno-cultural method not only in augmenting critical and creative agency, but as a practical exploration of the concept of data technicity, an inexhaustible relationality that exceeds the normative and regulatory utility of the data we generate and can be linked anew into collective capacities to act.
"This paper is a thoroughly updated version of our original 'Immaterial Labour 2.0' article publi... more "This paper is a thoroughly updated version of our original 'Immaterial Labour 2.0' article published in 2007 in the journal ephemera 7(1): 88-106.
Our new focus is on Facebook and we have expanded our discussion of affect, and added sections on social networks as archives (cf. Cvetkovich) and digital labour as performativity (cf. Butler). As well, this paper takes into account recent usages of social networks in revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt."
This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understandi... more This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.
In this short paper we discuss our work on co-research devices with a young coder community, whic... more In this short paper we discuss our work on co-research devices with a young coder community, which help investigate big social data collected by mobile phones. The development was accompanied by focus groups and interviews on privacy attitudes and aims to explore how youth cultures are tracked in mobile phone data.
The cultural worker is a key figure in social networks, producing the vast amounts of data which ... more The cultural worker is a key figure in social networks, producing the vast amounts of data which are integral to the profits sites of sites such as Facebook. This paper develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the contradictory ways in which user-generated data both extends networks of connectivity, while simultaneously renders subjects more productive within our information economy. By theorizing the digital profile as a personal archive I want to account for the ways in which digital archives of users on-line straddle the fine line between extension and domination, or rather between a desire for connectivity and the accumulation of surplus value based on the immaterial labour of those who frequent these socially networked spaces. The archive as a conceptual framework offers a theoretical paradigm to grasp the impact social media is having on the everyday lived experiences of users participate on-line and who are ultimately rendered productive as a very specific manifestation of the cultural worker – the prosumer
This chapter considers how advertising platforms like Facebook or companies like Cambridge Analyt... more This chapter considers how advertising platforms like Facebook or companies like Cambridge Analytica leveraged vast amounts of data to produce granulated, psychographic profiles that matched American voters with targeted political messages in the recent Trump elections. In so doing, it examines the relationship between current political practices and the technological changes that have rapidly transformed advertising and marketing industries. It goes on to discuss how processes of datafication should no longer be uniquely understood as economic but also as political to garner influence, raising important questions around the myriad ways in which political parties are now using algorithmic processes to reach potential voters. The chapter concludes by considering the relevance of datafied tactics of persuasion or ‘nudge politics’, given the small margins and means by which Trump won.
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Papers by Jennifer Pybus
Our new focus is on Facebook and we have expanded our discussion of affect, and added sections on social networks as archives (cf. Cvetkovich) and digital labour as performativity (cf. Butler). As well, this paper takes into account recent usages of social networks in revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt."
data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in
the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what
data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner,
an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of
the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the
enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young
people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.
Drafts by Jennifer Pybus
Our new focus is on Facebook and we have expanded our discussion of affect, and added sections on social networks as archives (cf. Cvetkovich) and digital labour as performativity (cf. Butler). As well, this paper takes into account recent usages of social networks in revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt."
data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in
the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what
data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner,
an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of
the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the
enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young
people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing.