As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term “data activism”. Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Technology Studies with Social Movement Studies, this theoretical article offers a foretaste of a research agenda on data activism. It foregrounds democratic agency vis-à-vis datafication, and unites under the same label ways of affirmative engagement with data (“proactive data activism”, e. g. databased advocacy) and tactics of resistance to massive data collection (“reactive data activism”, e. g. encryption practices), understood as a continuum along which activists position and reposition themselves and their tactics. The article argues that data activism supports the emergence of novel epistemic cultures within the realm of civil society, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention and generation of data countercultures. It offers the notion of data activism as a heuristic tool for the study of new forms of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication, and explores data activism as an evolving theoretical construct susceptible to contestation and revision.

No abstract

No abstract

The NSA disclosures have put the issue of surveillance at center stage, and with that, a range of technologies by which data are captured. This article aims to break up devices for data collection by discussing devices that leak data versus devices that are inserted into computers or networks in order to capture data. Taking a post-Foucauldian trajectory within surveillance theory as a point of reference, in which conceptual frameworks tended to emphasize data bodies and data flows, this article argues that the leaks potentially open new conceptual repertoires and research sites. Amongst other things, we might want to start focusing on devices that ‘get close’.

this article discusses how the browser plugin ghostery contributes to a particular understanding of contemporary consumer surveillance by making Web tracking transparent. the tracker tracker is a digital methods tool that, by following ghostery, detects trackers on specific sets of urls. it was used to examine all the websites of the government of the Netherlands on a regular basis. ghostery also invokes a particular informational genre which has an effect on how we understand the issue of Web tracking. the use of such a tool therefore raises a question: what happens when we repurpose an 'issue device' as 'research device'?