Towards Data Justice in a Datafied Society

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified not least in the Snowden leaks, and this is represented in policy, news coverage, and general public understanding. This complicates our positioning as digital citizens and colours our understanding of the datafied society; it has revealed big data and surveillance capitalism as a form of governance, and normalised data collection and surveillance culture in our everyday lives.

Governments now rely crucially on the mass collection of data across all areas of life, and on the processes of algorithmic decision-making that build on such data; this is the case in crucial societal areas such as policing and the allocation of public services. But such datafication is neither simply and inherently good nor bad: it represents a form of abstraction and representation that is rooted in a belief in the capacity of such data to represent everyday life, and to predict and preempt certain individual and social behaviours. This is a temporal shift in governance, from reaction to preemption, and to risk management through novel forms of algorithmic risk calculation.

Core to such debates is the framing of these developments as improving governance efficiency and security at the cost of individual privacy – yet there is now plenty of evidence about how inefficient and inaccurate such data-driven governance can be, and how it serves to further exclude particular social groups while entrenching the power of other social, societal, and commercial actors. As media scholars we must have a particular role in this space: much of the narrative about such initiatives has focussed merely on the algorithms on which they build, yet such algorithms are not necessarily auditable; instead, we must draw more on traditions in media studies that conceptualise such algorithms as situated in specific socio-cultural-industrial contexts.

This means decentring data and algorithms and focussing more on the people and institutions who develop and deploy them; we must study the uses to which data systems are put in everyday life, and place these systems in relation to other social practices. Such work shows that data-driven policing systems, for instance, are popular with law enforcement organisations because of the growing public criticism of more traditional policing methods.

This also means the politicisation of data systems as sites of struggle, and a greater investigation of the multiple forces, actors, and stakeholders that contribute to that struggle. Such research fights back against the concerted effort by interesting partners to frustrate public understanding of what really is at stake here, and seeks to disempower people from feeling that anything can be done to adjust the apparently inevitable course of present datafication developments.

Unchecked, that disempowerment leads to the understanding of data in a silo, disconnected from the contexts of their generation by numerous, poorly understood entities operating under their own codes of conduct and without sufficient societal supervision. Such uncontrolled activity also results from the immense corporate power of many of the ‘big tech’ companies and their subsidiaries who are operating in this space and who are forming their own partnerships with scholars. To push back against their power is a repoliticisation of research in this space, engaging fully with data politics and situating data within a broader social justice agenda. This work on data justice is gradually developing, and is beginning to connect previously disconnected issues and groups outside of the narrow field of digital activism.

This work opens up possibilities for defining problems and solutions on terms different from those preferred by governments and corporations; it is increasingly pressing as these stakeholders are actively seeking to narrow what may be discussed, and how.