On May 31st Antonio Martella, who has been a visiting scholar with DATACTIVE for the period March-May 2017, presents the outcome of his research project on ‘Big data and activism’, with presents an overview of progressively-minded projects, teams and tools using big data for research purposes.
Antonio is a PhD student at the Political Science Department of the University of Pisa. His research project is focused on political leaders, populism and social media. He graduated in Business communication and human resource policy and has a postgraduate master in “Big Data Analytics & Social Mining” by the University of Pisa along with the CNR of Pisa. His last publication, an article co-authored with Bracciale entitled “Define the populist political communication style: the case of Italian political leaders on Twitter” has recently appeared on Information, Communication & Society. He joined DATACTIVE thanks to a Erasmus + grant.
Stefania couldn’t make it to ‘Data and the Future of Critical Social Research’, a pre-conference to the the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association. Organized by Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry, the pre-conference took place on May 25 in San Diego, CA. The organizers, however, allowed Stefania to be present in spirit and… video. This is the presentation prepared for the event; below the abstract.
Abstract: Redefining citizenship. For a socio-technical theory of agency in datafied societies by Stefania Milan
Datafication has brought about a fundamental paradigm shift in the contemporary socio-political order. Information has become the one constitutive force in society capable to shape social reality (Braman, 2009). On the one hand, the advent of ‘big data’ has altered our conditions of existence in society. On the other, the crisis that has infected liberal democracy at the turn of the century has been accelerated by the so-called ‘surveillance capitalism’, and democratic norms are challenged by the new expression of power enshrined in the global architecture of data extraction, commodification, and control (Zuboff, 2015). The state-industry surveillant complex, replacing governments as the primary holder of the monopoly over information and control, recursively engages in exercises of definition and activation of the ‘algorithmic citizenship’ (Cheney-Lippold, 2011). This distributed ‘algorithmic power’ has generative properties that leave little room for human agency (Lash, 2007). Linked databases, platforms and apps—the information architecture of datafication—are changing the definition of what constitutes public sphere and participation in the datafied society. Hence we ought to ask what constitutes democratic agency today. How is its nature changing? What practices create or jeopardize it? What makes collectivity nowadays? But also: Who are the drivers of the on-going process of redefinition of citizenship? What sort of spaces, mechanisms, and actors meet the growing demand for citizen participation? How does this redefinition of citizenship change institutions themselves?
This theoretical contribution addresses three notions, namely ‘data citizenship’, ‘data activism’ (Milan & van der Velden, 2016) and ‘data epistemology’. Taking data and datafication simultaneously as objects of contentions and elements of a novel politics of the quotidian, and exploring forms of resilience and mobilization as democratic processes, the presentation explores how contemporary engagement with grassroots and top-down data politics and practices alters the way people enact their democratic agency. While the lack of transparency and the threats to privacy negatively alter the trust relation between people and the ruling institutions, emerging data practices have the ability to carve out space for a new relationship, giving new meaning to the notion of democratic agency and forcing us to rethink the relationship between the state and its citizens. Data citizenship, data activism and data epistemology are offered as the building blocks of an emerging socio-technical theory of agency in the datafied society, needed to meet the ontological challenges datafication poses to established socio-political practices in Western democracies.
Cited works
Braman, S. (2009). Change of state: Information, policy, and power. MIT Press.
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A New Algorithmic Identity Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(6), 164–181.
Lash, S. (2007). Power after hegemony: Cultural studies in mutation. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 55–78.
Milan, S., & van der Velden, L. (2016). The alternative epistemologies of data activism. Digital Culture & Society, 2(2), 57–74.
Zuboff, S. (2015). Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89.
On May 19, Stefania will present two papers at the conference ‘TILTing Perspectives 2017: Regulating a connected world’ in Tilburg. Both of them tells pieces of the DATACTIVE story. The first features research on internet governance and privacy (and the WHOIS databased in particular), partially told thanks to BigBang, the software DATACTIVE is currently developing with the key help of Research Associate Sebastian Benthall. The paper that follows explores the connection and interaction between software cultures (and hacker values in particular) and the counter-expertise of data activism. The conference is organized by the Tilburg Institute for Law Technology and Society (TILT), of which Stefania is a Research Associate. Check out the amazing program of TILTing 2017!
On May 15-17, Stefania is in Stockholm to attend the Stockholm Internet Forum (SIF) 2017.
SIF an international forum discussing how a free, open and secure internet promotes human rights and development worldwide. With a focus on the global South, the event brings together policymakers, activists, as well as the business and technical community. This year’s theme is “access and power”, and building on the Swedish feminist foreign policy there will be a strong focus on gender equality. SIF debates many topics of interest to DATACTIVE, including for example digital identity, responsible data, smart cities and the platform economy. Stefania will participate in the meetings of the Freedom Online Coalition, as a member of the Working Group 1 “An Internet Free and Secure”, and engage in data collection.
My current work aims to provide a social movement approach in order to study civic tech activism. I am asking How we can account for power dynamics in the strive to open up civil society space for governance engagement through data and technology infrastructure.
During the CosmoShare talk I will introduce my conceptual work aiming to emphasize the central role of communication for power dynamics in social and political change processes. Bringing into dialogue social movement studies and communication theory, I will build on contemporary conceptualisations within media practice theory (Kubitschko 2017; Couldry 2015) by contributing an enlarged framework that explicitly accounts for communication from a non-technical and a non-western perspective. To develop the framework, I turn to Freire and Pasquali’s theorization of communication as human relations.
Stefania Milan will participate in the Data Power Workshop, the 15th of May at the University College London.
About the conference:
Data is simultaneously the ultimate solution and the ultimate threat. On the one hand, big data is framed as a means to reach deeper, more real truths about the world and about people. On the other, framing data as an infinite economic and administrative resource undergirds the extractive machinery of control that characterises the state/corporate data industry. Data is captured, harvested and mined for ‘insights’, and these insights are understood not only to give deeper access to reality, but as being imbued with new forms of economic value and political control in their own right. Thus your data knows you better than you know yourself, and this knowledge produces value/power beyond your reach: data power.
Many critical artists, data scholars, and activists are working, in different ways, to better understand and creatively re-work this form of data power. However, so far there has been little space for dialogue between these practitioners. There has been even less space for these approaches to be thought alongside and with data and computer scientists. In this workshop, we are bringing together artists, activists, data scientists, art historians, data visualisation experts, information theorists, sociologists and anthropologists, in order to generate new conversations and new framings for data.
We want to flesh out a trans-disciplinary critical language that does not just re-inscribe the divide between the quantitative and the qualitative. We want to shape new questions that need to be asked about ethics, aesthetics, representation, power, and method. We want to explore data, big and otherwise, as a site for methodological experimentation, social activism, artistic intervention, and critical, creative engagement.
We will discuss the main conclusions of the book “Political Activism in the Era of Internet”, in which we analyse experiences from six South American countries, presenting a broad range of innovative experiences and their impacts on the ways in which civil society, political parties and governments are organized and act. The cases of cyberactivism analyzed indicate that none of them represents a “silver bullet” — an experience capable of resolving the multiple challenges faced in constructing higher quality, more robust democratic institutions. But they all indicate new possibilities and new challenges for the development of virtuous relations between the traditional forms of participation (both in civil society organizations and in political parties) and activism in the virtual space.
Bio
Bernardo Sorj was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is a naturalized Brazilian, living in Brazil since 1976. He studied anthropology, philosophy and history and received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Manchester in England. Sorj is the director of the Edelstein Center for Social Research in Rio de Janeiro, and Plataforma Democrática project. He was professor of Sociology (ret.) at the University of Rio de Janeiro, visiting professor and chair at many European, d North American and Latin American universities. The author of 28 books and more than 100 articles on international relations, the social impact of new technologies and Latin America political development, he is member of the board of several academic journals, and consultant to NGOs, governments and international organizations.
This week we have Umberto Boschi joining the team for a couple of months as a research intern: Umberto Boschi is currently enrolled in New Media and Digital Culture at the Utrecht University as a MA student. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. His research interests vary from Blockchain technologies to the imaginary of Open Data.
Moreover, Joris van Hoboken is the newest member of the ethics board, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. Short bio: his research addresses law and policy in the field of digital media, electronic communications and the internet, with a focus on the fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of expression and transatlantic relations. Current research includes an investigation of privacy in smartphone ecosystems, together with MIT, as well as work on the right to be forgotten and encryption policy. He is a specialist in data privacy, government surveillance through cloud computing and the regulation of internet intermediaries and algorithmic governance.
On the 21st of April Lonneke participated in the ‘Nacht van de Filosofie’ (The Night of Philosophy) in Nijmegen, in a panel about ‘Digital Unrest’. The panel was about Big Data, perceptions of Big Data, and the possible implications of Big Data for privacy and politics. She talked about data activism, and how activists have different ways of responding to Big Data challenges. The other panelists were Patricia de Vries (media critic and researcher writing about algorithmic epistemology), Marjolijn Lanzing (a privacy researcher in the context of Big Data and self-tracking ) and the panel was moderated by Joyce Pijnenburg (philosopher and member of SWIP). SWIP is the Society for Women in Philosophy in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Friday the 21st of April, Lonneke van der Velden gave a talk at the Radboud University in a ‘conversation with philosophers’. Find the program here (in Dutch)
Can we think of a radical turn in thinking about the self and our relationships in a time of social media? And what about the use of Big Data and our Privacy? Join the panel discussion and reflect on what philosopher Byung Chul-Han describes as ‘the digital era, an era without reason’.
