The ability to gather data that can be crunched by machines is valuable for studying society. The new methods needed to work it require new skills and new ways of thinking about best research practices. This book reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what it can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.
Digitization has transformed the way we interact with our social, political and economic environments. While it has enhanced the potential for citizen agency, it has also enabled the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. This requires us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of digital citizenship, based on an awareness of the ways in which citizens are increasingly monitored, categorized, sorted and profiled. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society offers a new understanding of citizenship in an age defined by data collection and processing. The book traces the social forces that shape digital citizenship by investigating regulatory frameworks, mediated public debate, citizens' knowledge and understanding, and possibilities for dissent and resistance.
Over the past forty years, media education research has emerged as a historical, epistemological and practical field of study. Shifts in the field—along with radical transformations in media technologies, aesthetic forms, ownership models, and audience participation practices—have driven the application of new concepts and theories across a range of both school and non-school settings. The Handbook on Media Education Research is a unique exploration of the complex set of practices, theories, and tools of media research. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of internationally recognized experts and practitioners, this timely volume discusses recent developments in the field in the context of related scholarship, public policy, formal and non-formal teaching and learning, and DIY and community practice. Offering a truly global perspective, the Handbook focuses on empirical work from Media and Information Literacy (MIL) practitioners from around the world. The book’s five parts explore global youth cultures and the media, trans-media learning, media literacy and scientific controversies, varying national approaches to media research, media education policies, and much more. A ground breaking resource on the concepts and theories of media research, this important book: Provides a diversity of views and experiences relevant to media literacy education research Features contributions from experts from a wide-range of countries including South Africa, Finland, India, Italy, Brazil, and many more Examines the history and future of media education in various international contexts Discusses the development and current state of media literacy education institutions and policies Addresses important contemporary issues such as social media use; datafication; digital privacy, rights, and divides; and global cultural practices. The Handbook of Media Education Research is an invaluable guide for researchers in the field, undergraduate and graduate students in media studies, policy makers, and MIL practitioners.
This book attends to the transformation of processes and practices in education, relating to its increasing digitisation and datafication. The introduction of new means to measure, capture, describe and represent social life in numbers has not only transformed the ways in which teaching and learning are organised, but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data. Contributions consider data practices that span across different countries, educational fields and governance levels, ranging from early childhood education, to schools, universities, educational technology providers, to educational policy making and governance. The book demonstrates how digital data not only support decision making, but also fundamentally change the organisation of learning and teaching, and how these transformation processes can have partly ambivalent consequences, such as new possibilities for participation, but also the monitoring and emergence/manifestation of inequalities. Focusing on how data can drive decision making in education and learning, this book will be of interest to those studying both educational technology and educational policy making. The chapters in this book were originally published in Learning, Media and Technology. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society. Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today’s media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a 'good life' for all. Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
This Open Access book examines the ambivalences of data power. Firstly, the ambivalences between global infrastructures and local invisibilities challenge the grand narrative of the ephemeral nature of a global data infrastructure. They make visible local working and living conditions, and the resources and arrangements required to operate and run them. Secondly, the book examines ambivalences between the state and data justice. It considers data justice in relation to state surveillance and data capitalism, and reflects on the ambivalences between an "entrepreneurial state" and a "welfare state." Thirdly, the authors discuss ambivalences of everyday practices and collective action, in which civil society groups, communities, and movements try to position the interests of people against the "big players" in the tech industry. The book includes eighteen chapters that provide new and varied perspectives on the role of data and data infrastructures in our increasingly datafied societies. Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communications and Head of ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany. He is the author of 12 monographs including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Nick Couldry, 2017), Transcultural Communication (2015) and Cultures of Mediatization (2013). Juliane Jarke is a senior researcher at the Institute for Information Management Bremen (ifi b) and Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, Germany. Jarke co-edited The Datafication of Education (with Andreas Breiter, 2019) and Probes as Participatory Design Practice (with Susanne Maa, 2018). Leif Kramp is a post-doctoral media, communication and history scholar and Research Coordinator of the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen (ZeMKI), Germany. Kramp has authored and edited various books about the transformation of media and journalism and is a founding member of the German Association of Media and Journalism Criticism (VfMJ).
An inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.
A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering. It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of social life. This text aims to understand the powerful role of the data analytics industry and how this industry facilitates the spread and intensification of data-led processes. As such, The Data Gaze is concerned with understanding how data-led, data-driven and data-reliant forms of capitalism pervade organisational and everyday life. Using a clear theoretical approach derived from Foucault and critical data studies, the text develops the concept of the data gaze and shows how powerful and persuasive it is. It’s an essential and subversive guide to data analytics and data capitalism.
