No abstract

Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of “datafication” or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastructures, clinical health care, and self-care practices. For the purposes of this review, we focus mainly on the latter two domains, examining how scholars in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies have begun to explore the datafication of clinical and self-care practices. We identify the dominant themes and questions, methodological approaches, and analytical resources of this emerging literature, parsing these under three headings: datafied power, living with data, and data–human mediations. We conclude by urging scholars to pay closer attention to how datafication is unfolding on the “other side” of various digital divides (e.g., financial, technological, geographic), to experiment with applied forms of research and data activism, and to probe links to areas of datafication that are not explicitly related to health.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface exemplifies the tendency of modern capitalism to bring space, time, and money into intensified relation and sheds light on the question of what might or might not be distinctive about the rationalities and libidinal investments of the “digital age.”

Social, political, economic, geographic and cultural processes related to the significant growth of the gambling industries have, in recent years, been the subject of a growing body of research. This body of research has highlighted relationships between social class and gambling expenditure, as well as the design, marketing and location of gambling products and businesses. It has also demonstrated the regressive nature of much gambling revenue, illuminating the influence that large gambling businesses have had on government policy and on researchers, including research priorities, agendas, and outcomes. Recently, critics have contended that although such scholarship has produced important insights about the operations and effects of gambling businesses, it is ideologically motivated and lacks scientific rigour. This response explains some basic theoretical and disciplinary concepts that such critique misunderstands, and argues for the value of social, political economic, geographic and cultural perspectives to the broader, interdisciplinary field of gambling research.

The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value the present at the expense of the future? There is contentious debate within the field over how to model this tendency at the neural level. Should the brain be conceptualized as a unified decision-making apparatus, or as the site of conflict between an impetuous limbic system at perpetual odds with its deliberate and provident overseer in the prefrontal cortex? Scientific debates over choice-making in the brain, we argue, are also debates over how to define the constraints on human reason with which regulative strategies must contend. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how the brain and its treatment of the future become the contested terrain for distinct visions of governmental intervention into problems of human choice-making.