Accounting for “the social” in contact tracing applications: The paradox  between public health governance and mistrust of government's data use

Li, Yao‐Tai

doi:10.1177/20539517211054277

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Observing the linkage between trust in government and trust in technology Li recorded the mistrust of the Hong Kong citizens towards their government and the applications developed by it as contributing to the citizens' unwillingness to follow the government's directives at the rst stages of the pandemic 39 .…”

Section: Trust In Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Countering the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. A Successful Securitization in an Environment of Low Political Trust.

Stivas

Cole

2023

Preprint

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In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities around the world securitized the virus and enforced unprecedented tactics. A successful securitization presupposes a common understanding between the authorities and the public about the calibre of the threat and the necessity of the extraordinary measures. A trustworthy government should securitize an issue of its preference easier than an untrustworthy government. Hong Kong, our case study, is unique because of the government’s success with securitizing the pandemic in a context of extremely low political trust. Among the exceptional mechanisms that the government of Hong Kong utilized to control the outbreak were smart technologies. This paper examines the extent to which trust in the government and trust in smart technologies influenced the success of the securitization of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. To answer this question, we build on publicly available surveys assessing political trust in Hong Kong, on tailormade questionnaires investigating the sentiments of Hong Kong citizens towards smart technologies and on a Focus Group exercise with carefully selected residents of Hong Kong. The results of this study suggest that under certain circumstances, governments can successfully securitize a health-emergency even when they do not enjoy high levels of political trust.

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Section: Trust In Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Countering the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. A Successful Securitization in an Environment of Low Political Trust.

Stivas

Cole

2023

Preprint

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“…Furthermore, it involves “…the frameworks of understanding within which individuals live; a way to describe what they take or understand various actions, or inactions, or statuses to be; and a way to understand how the understandings change.” (Lessig, 1995: 952, emphasis in original). As Li (2021) notes, “the social” is essential for untangling governance involving datafication beyond the digital infrastructure. The social hereby lends itself—including its fabric and variation—to systematic description, exploration, and elaboration for a proper understanding of contingent data governance in this study.…”

Section: Social Data Governance: a Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social data governance: Towards a definition and model

Liu

2022

Big Data & Society

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With the surge in the number of data and datafied governance initiatives, arrangements, and practices across the globe, understanding various types of such initiatives, arrangements, and their structural causes has become a daunting task for scholars, policy makers, and the public. This complexity additionally generates substantial difficulties in considering different data(fied) governances commensurable with each other. To advance the discussion, this study argues that existing scholarship is inclined to embrace an organization-centric perspective that primarily concerns factors and dynamics regarding data and datafication at the organizational level at the expense of macro-level social, political, and cultural factors of both data and governance. To explicate the macro, societal dimension of data governance, this study then suggests the term “social data governance” to bring forth the consideration that data governance not only reflects the society from which it emerges but also (re)produces the policies and practices of the society in question. Drawing on theories of political science and public management, a model of social data governance is proposed to elucidate the ideological and conceptual groundings of various modes of governance from a comparative perspective. This preliminary model, consisting of a two-dimensional continuum, state intervention and societal autonomy for the one, and national cultures for the other, accounts for variations in social data governance across societies as a complementary way of conceptualizing and categorizing data governance beyond the European standpoint. Finally, we conduct an extreme case study of governing digital contact-tracing techniques during the pandemic to exemplify the explanatory power of the proposed model of social data governance.

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“…Recent developments of smart cities, as for example in Europe (Julsrud and Krogstad 2020), in the United States (Schmidt and Manley 2020), and in China (Li 2021), have heightened both scholarly and public attention to the issues of trust and distrust as fundamental prisms for understanding public policy acceptability (Galdon-Clavell 2013). The three articles of this special feature each engage with different elements of this debate: mapping attitudes and types of trust via results of a survey (Cole and Tran), providing an ethical roadmap for comparing various smart city initiatives in Hong Kong (Ip and Cheng), and engaging in multilevel analysis of smart energy, involving Hong Kong and the broader Greater Bay Area (Cheung et al).…”

Section: Editorialmentioning

confidence: 99%