Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data

Abstract

In this article, the author uses Foucault's largely overlooked but vital concept, the dispositif, in relation to the recent rise of mobility, explosion of data and proliferation of platforms and apps. With a focus on how data an individual generates increasingly moves autonomously of their control, he presents the dispositif of ‘data motility’ to develop a new materialist analysis of the digital human as a discursive and non-discursive assemblage.

Conceptualizing Big Social Data

“…From another perspective, Mark Coté makes the attempt to distinguish BSD concept from the broader category of Big Data [36]. In his viewpoint, Big Data is any data produced as the result of the quantification of the world that may include data from sensors, multiple industrial and domestic networks as well as financial markets, whereas BSD "comes from the mediated communicative practices of our everyday lives, whenever we go online, use our smartphone, use an app or make a purchase. "…”

Mobile media and ecologies of location

“…A second interviewee stated that they only tag Facebook with location some of the time, while noting earlier in the interview that all their Foursquare check-ins were pushed to Facebook. While a third offered the following reflection on their Google accounts: This particular participant appears oblivious to the various forms of geodemographic profiling and targeted marketing that Google employs using end user data (Barreneche, 2012a), and of the motility of social media and search data as it moves between a company like Google and various third parties (Coté, 2014).…”

“…However, the complexities of these arrangements at the same time suggest the need for methodological enrichment and extension in ways that account for the politics of the operation and use of application programming interfaces (APIs) (Bucher, 2012), the particular dynamics of search economics (Van Couvering, 2011), algorithmic processing (Gillespie, 2014), and of predictive analytics and data sorting (Bucher, 2012;Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). In addition, cross-platform deals and data-sharing arrangements, and the 'data motility' of which Coté (2014) writes, pose many challenges for end user understanding of data retention and individual privacy. A key focus in existing scholarship on locative media and privacy has been on emphasising that users' negotiations of locational privacy is, and ought to be, 'intimately related to the ability to control the context in which one shares locational information' (De Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012, p. 129).…”

Capability in the digital: institutional media management and its dis/contents

“…For wider discussions on dark nets see Bartlett (2014). For critical discussion on social data see Cote (2014);Manovich (2011). For a discussion on digital methods see Kennedy et al (2015).…”