Hacking the social life of Big Data

Abstract

This paper builds on the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing

‘Depends on Who’s Got the Data’: Public Understandings of Personal Digital Dataveillance

“…While several people used the term 'scary' when describing the extent of data collection in which they are implicated and the knowledge that other people may have about them from their online interactions and transactions, the participants struggled to articulate more specifically what the implications of such collection were. Similar findings were evident in Kennedy et al's focus groups held in the UK, Spain and Sweden (2015) and in another focus group study with British teenagers (Pybus, Coté, and Blanke 2015).…”

Simondon on Datafication. A Techno-Cultural Method

“…6 The workshop was inspired by a key finding in the Our Data Ourselves project, regarding the irregular data activity of one of the applications -Line Keep Inused by two of our participants. According to our findings, this application had a data flow 35 times higher than the other applications we examined (Pybus et al 2015). Upon inspecting the code, we found several embedded tools gathering deep statistics and pushing user messages, in addition to a much broader range of permissions seeking personal data access.…”

“…This paper draws on both the practice of the hackathon and subject of the hacker to ask after the data deluge, what? That is, now that processes of datafication (Cukier/Mayer-Schonberger 2013;Pybus et al 2015) have suffused everyday life, transforming how we understand ourselves and the world around us, and increasingly articulating our conditions of possibility in ever-more real time, what can we do to gain data agency? Here we pose a political question: can the interlocking practice and subject of hacking exceed their traditional parameters to strategically counter the tendency toward control and value extraction, which increasingly dominates processes of datafication?…”

The big data divide and its consequences

“…That is, data subjects are not “cultural dopes” (Giddens, ) that act according to the dictates of structure, but are agents with their own sets of goals, priorities, and rationales. Pybus, Cote, and Blanke () make a similar argument, advocating for increased data literacy and an alternative approach to data collection that they call “data making” (Pybus et al . , , p. 3).…”

“…Pybus, Cote, and Blanke () make a similar argument, advocating for increased data literacy and an alternative approach to data collection that they call “data making” (Pybus et al . , , p. 3). Data making stands in sharp contrast to other notions of data collection in that individuals are not simply passive sources of data, but with the right resources, are active producers and consumers of data, highlighting the need for a more nuanced view of agency in big data studies, that differs from the prevailing view within data divide scholarship that data subjects have little to no agency (Kennedy, Poell, & van Dijck, ; Lash, ).…”