Search

The article "Big Tech Platforms: What Are the Limits to 'Big Brother' Surveillance and Influence?" by Annabelle Gawer discusses the unprecedented economic power and influence of Big Tech platforms like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. These platforms dominate various sectors, such as digital advertising, e-commerce, and social media, raising concerns about privacy, data exploitation, and manipulation of user behavior. The article highlights the need for both public regulation and self-regulation to address these issues and prevent exploitation, emphasizing the importance of users' sovereignty in decision-making within platform ecosystems. [Extracted from the article]

Datafication is changing from the value of concept to the value of layer for the present world. It describes every aspect of our lives with data. In this paper, the researchers put the datafication in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Also, the authors examine some aspects changed by datafication. The researchers look at several aspects (put in context with the industrial evolution) and also to the effect of datafication on several areas of human activity. By using a qualitative approach, the research examines the datafication and its various dimensions. The results suggest the need for robust, transparent systems to manage the complexity of data and advocate for ethical and privacy considerations. These insights are crucial for policymakers, businesses, and academics, providing a comprehensive understanding of the legal environment, societal impacts, and innovation potential in the European Union.

The ‘smart city’ has been driven by advances in information and communication technologies, with the aim of integrating these technologies with urban infrastructures for improved optimisation, automation and control. Smart cities have emerged as a response to the challenges faced by megacities and are likely to manifest the ‘datafying’ society in the public space. However, the pervasive nature of data collection, continuous analysis and inference, and long-term data storage result in a potentially problematic reconfiguration of society that undermines individual and collective autonomy. This article proposes the concept of ‘data autonomy’ as a guiding principle for the development of smart cities, addressing challenges related to the potential misuse of personal data, sphere transgression, and datafied gentrification. Section II. explores concerns related to data protection law, which can be understood as a proxy for the relationship between the individual and society, highlighting power dynamics and the autonomy of individuals and communities. Section III. discusses the concept of sphere transgression, where tech giants expand their influence in society without adequate expertise or accountability. Section IV. examines the potential impact of datafied gentrification on individual and collective autonomy. Building on the challenges identified throughout these sections, this paper proposes ‘data autonomy’ as a guiding principle for smart city development in section V., promoting a value-based approach centred on human dignity. To make it practicable, increased interdisciplinary collaboration in the development of smart cities is needed, with a particular focus on improved design and impact assessment methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the conceptual framework of datafication, dataism and dataveillance, this study investigates beliefs and attitudes regarding datafication and the related privacy and security concerns among individuals with Type 1 diabetes. Qualitative research was conducted through interviews among fifty-two individuals with Type 1 diabetes in Poland and Italy. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay between self-discipline and empowerment. The majority of interviewees emphasized the benefits of technologies for gaining a better understanding of their health condition and for more effective disease management. However, a minority of interviewees perceived the negative effects of datafication, including dataveillance, which leads to hyper-control of the disease, and dataism, characterized by excessive reliance on and dependency on technology. Critical beliefs about technologies fuelled rejection attitudes, leading some interviewees to suspend or abandon their use. Lastly, reflexivity on privacy and security issues appears to be low, particularly among older individuals with lower levels of education and socioeconomic status. This results in a poor understanding and underestimation of the potential risks associated with security and privacy. The findings increase the understanding of the factors that can facilitate or hinder the adoption of technology among people with diabetes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual article theorises the tensioned interplay between digitalization, datafication and automation and subjectness in education by asking what intensifying datafication and automation means for teacher--student relationships and how we understand and approach education. Theoretically, the paper draws on Buber's ideas of the dialogical I--Thou and objectified I--It as the key forms of human relationships. The core argument is that increasing datafication and automation steers the teacher--student relationship towards an objectified I--It relationship instead of the dialogical I--Thou relationship, which Buber (and others such as Biesta, another main influencer of the present paper) saw as the ideal. Literature-informed examples of various forms of educational datafication and automation are provided to support and concretise the arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals and groups increasingly seek to resist the harms and risks of a data-driven society. This essay explores the possibility of individual and collective resistance vis-à-vis datafication, drawing on examples from across the globe. It shows how infrastructure, political agency, and tactics have changed in response to datafication. It reviews six resistance tactics, distinguishing between “defensive resistance” and “productive resistance”: self-defence, subversion, avoidance, literacy, counter-imagination, and advocacy campaigning. Investigating them offers insights on the ability of social actors to contribute to innovation in mobilising practices amidst intrusive surveillance.

The research presented here explores the nuances of data collection and sharing via digital platforms in everyday CrossFit coaching practice. There is a growing body of work on data and digital platforms in CrossFit, though currently there is a lack of understanding of the role of coaches in these processes. Empirically grounding the digital fitness practices of CrossFit coaching is essential for our understanding of the sport, as well as to critically engage with the dominant socio-technical narratives of the digital fitness revolution: narratives that obscure the agency of coaches. This research foregrounds the coaches’ agency and lived experiences, focusing on their everyday coaching practices around data and digital platforms. Six semi-structured in-depth interviews with CrossFit coaches in Sweden were undertaken in 2023. These focused on if, when, how and why they collect, or encourage their participants to collect, data on their training and share this via digital platforms. The findings reveal several different, though interrelated, areas where the CrossFit coaches can be seen as mediating between often competing narratives around data and digital platforms. These everyday practices include mediating between group vs. individual training, data collection and sharing vs. “moving well”, CrossFit's methodology of quantification of fitness vs. the needs of the participants and navigating the techno-solutionist vs. reductionist narratives around digital fitness tracking.

In this essay, I offer some critical reflections on how digitalisation and datafication may challenge the values and principles that underpin the Nordic welfare state, and as such inform the relationship between the citizens and the state. In response to these challenges, I argue that we should apply a human-rights-based approach when assessing the strength and weaknesses of existing solutions, as well as when developing new systems and services.

This commentary discusses the main implications of the datafication of welfare services, particularly from the perspective of Finland, on the basis of research conducted in the past five years in the field of public service media, welfare state values and data inequalities. I argue that we should not only look at the practical level of digital tools and data-driven services, but should also think more profoundly about how these technologies shape society, particularly with regard to the sense of solidarity, social justice, and equality.

This paper deals with the question of how the process of digitalisation on the technical basis of the computer can be described in Marxist categories and what consequences are foreseeable as a result. To this end, the first section shows, based on a historical analysis of the emergence of the computer, that this apparatus was invented as an instrument of a division of human mental labour and thus complementary to the division of physical labour. It is therefore necessary to analyse computers and digitalisation in their relation to human beings and human labour. In the second section, the central ideology of digitalisation is elaborated, which is supposed to make the current form of digitalisation appear meaningful for people and society: The anthropomorphisation of the computer, which was said to be increasingly able to think, speak, and learn like humans, to become more and more intelligent, and to be able to do everything better than humans once the technical singularity had been reached. This claim, which has been propagated again and again, is contradicted on various levels. The computer operates on about two dozen simple mathematical, logical, and technical commands and can do nothing but run one programme at a time, developed and entered by programmers on the basis of behavioural or physical data. This sometimes produces amazing results because the computer can work quickly and systematically as well as reliably. But in contrast to humans, it faces the world as a behaviouristic machine that can neither understand meaning nor reflect its own or human behaviour. The computer also ”sees” and ”hears” its environment only on a physical basis and it ”thinks” at best on a statistical basis if the programme tells it to do so. The apparatus can therefore simulate mechanical machines, but in interaction with humans its actions and reactions are, as any machine, not socially oriented, but dependent on whether humans interpret them as meaningful und useful. The third section elaborates on the complementarity of mental and physical divisions of labour. This would be a central theme of a critical Marxism for an analysis of digitalisation today, which understands the previous capitalism from the division of physical labour. Even though there are some theoreticians who have contributed to this, so far there is no comprehensive theory of it. Therefore, section 4 wants to contribute to such a theory by collecting empirical observations in an interpretive way regarding the related questions. In this way, it becomes clear how the division of people's intellectual labour made possible by the computer is being dealt with today: Capitalism is reorganising more and more areas of human life such as mobility, social relations, education, medicine, etc. through the use of the computer. As a result, first and foremost the business fields of the digital economy are expanding. Moreover, capitalism no longer has to limit itself to controlling the field of production but is increasingly intervening in the whole symbolic world of people. Consequently, according to the thesis, we are heading for an expanded capitalism that will increasingly restrict and reduce both democracy and people's self-realisation. Section 5 emphasises once again that a different digitalisation is also possible, one that serves humanity and not capitalism. Further, some summarising and comments are added there.

Copyright of Investigación Bibliotecológica is the property of UNAM, Centro Universitario de Investigaciones Bibliotecologicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Report: Zeitschrift für Weiterbildungsforschung is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of REICE. Ibero-American Journal on Quality, Effectiveness & Change in Education / REICE. Revista Iberoamericana Sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación is the property of Red Iberoamericana de Investigacion sobre Cambio y Eficacia en Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of REICE. Ibero-American Journal on Quality, Effectiveness & Change in Education / REICE. Revista Iberoamericana Sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación is the property of Red Iberoamericana de Investigacion sobre Cambio y Eficacia en Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politologija is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the ways in which what we call the analogue and the datafied mindsets perceive the functioning of the datafied world. Based on a qualitative interview study of two generations of media users in Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden, we present and analyze underlying patterns in participants' media attitudes and related practices. We show that belonging to a media generation does not always produce a homogeneous mindset or a uniform attitude toward media technologies. These mindsets, being ideal-typical constructs, are not bound to individuals: the same person can display features of the analogue and the datafied mindset in relation to different parts of the datafied world. One mindset does not replace the other but rather adds another layer to the social action of the individuals. The mindsets are multi-dimensional and molded by contrasting understandings, indicating that the tenacious structures of the analogue world linger on in the datafied social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe, the public sector is expanding its efforts to introduce data-driven decision-support and intelligent systems in the administration of welfare. The growing body of research that highlights the impact and harms these systems have on citizens’ lives, raises questions about the guiding ideas, values, and norms that are at the heart of current transformations in welfare. Research in critical data studies contends a silent marketisation of social protection and governance. It implies an intricate entanglement between the procedures and output of service provision on the one hand and the normative outcomes in terms of the well-being and flourishing of society as a whole on the other hand. Thinking with the capabilities approach and buen vivir as well as with the concept of data justice, our paper asks how to conceptualise this relation. It discusses how (in)justice may become a sociomaterial component in automated welfare and emphasises that welfare outcomes and welfare practices, including their procedural aspects, are rather co-produced than just interdependent. We conclude that whether future infrastructures of welfare will create public value or not, depends on the institutional arrangements, policies, and norms built to distribute the emerging benefits and risks equally in society.

This conceptual article theorises the tensioned interplay between digitalization, datafication and automation and subjectness in education by asking what intensifying datafication and automation means for teacher–student relationships and how we understand and approach education. Theoretically, the paper draws on Buber’s ideas of the dialogical I–Thou and objectified I–It as the key forms of human relationships. The core argument is that increasing datafication and automation steers the teacher–student relationship towards an objectified I–It relationship instead of the dialogical I–Thou relationship, which Buber (and others such as Biesta, another main influencer of the present paper) saw as the ideal. Literature-informed examples of various forms of educational datafication and automation are provided to support and concretise the arguments.

Research has shown that critical data literacies development for educators is seldom a core component of most campus conversations about datafication, even as extractive, datafied systems become pervasive throughout the higher education sector. This article outlines findings from an international, qualitative, Comparative Case Study (CCS) of university professionals teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It overviews beliefs and barriers shaping educators’ responses to datafication and focuses specifically on their perceptions of faculty development opportunities related to digital classroom tools and to datafication more broadly. The article presents insights into how faculty understands higher education’s contemporary datafied infrastructure and highlights participants’ voices about faculty professional development and critical data literacies. Based on our findings, we recommend formal faculty development and broader professional learning conversations as a means of enhancing faculty awareness and agency within the higher education sector.

As teachers and teacher educators in the United States, we offer this editorial based on our lived experiences with the political, social, and environmental precarities where we live. Among these precarities are our looming U.S. presidential election after the last one included a plot by bad actors to abscond with our State’s electoral votes, our constant struggle for water in a desert state, and our weak overall internet connectivity. We call our wonderings about how we are living in and somehow surviving these times, radical uncertainties. In this editorial, we canvas radical uncertainties related to e-learning about digital literacies, generative text, datafication, and the camera gaze. Alongside these uncertainties, we offer alternative avenues for collective thinking based on Chicana Feminist epistemologies. We intend for readers to consider how local knowing can and should inform e-learning planning and practice.

Zusammenfassung Im Kontext des digitalen Wandels und der damit einhergehenden Datafizierung vieler Lebensbereiche gewinnt der kompetente und kritisch-reflektierte Umgang mit Daten und deren Nutzung an Relevanz (Data Literacy). Vor diesem Hintergrund wird im Beitrag die Thematisierung von Daten und datenbezogenen Anwendungen in Angeboten der Erwachsenenbildung untersucht. Es wurden 137 Programme von Volkshochschulen aus den Jahren 2010 bis 2021 quantitativ und qualitativ hinsichtlich der Verbreitung und der inhaltlichen Ausrichtung datenbezogener Angebote analysiert. Angebote, die potenziell Data Literacy fördern, sind in fast allen Programmen enthalten und verzeichnen eine Zunahme im betrachteten Zeitraum. Die Inhaltsanalyse zeigt, dass viele Angebote Datenschutz und -sicherheit und nur wenige Angebote die aktive Verarbeitung von Daten fokussieren.

This study investigates the function of data journalism in a UK newsroom using Bourdieu’s field theory. The collection of study data was conducted through in-depth interviews, utilising a qualitative research methodology. The data obtained revealed that data journalism, a sub-field of journalism, continues to develop in an interdisciplinary structure and creates a new type of habitus (data habitus) within the field of journalism. This study also shows that the data journalism team in the newspaper has moved from being niche to being established as one of the most active and effective main sections of the newsroom, and that data-driven journalism has the potential to influence other teams. Lastly, this study suggested that the newsroom is undergoing a process of datafication by indicating the newspaper’s intention to develop data skills beyond the data journalism team.

ABSTRACTThe educational services industry has grown internationally, and there has been an explosion in external programmes that teach basics and behavioural control, as well as administrative data programmes. This growth has affected the governance of preschools worldwide and spurred schoolification and marketisation. In this context, this study examines how the growth of the private education industry within the education system has influenced preschool principals’ work in Iceland. Our critical theoretical perspective aims to explore how educational trends grounded in neoliberalism have shaped the work of preschool principals. The data consisted of a questionnaire distributed to all preschool principals in Iceland. The findings showed that schoolification, informed by educational authorities and the private education industry, has shaped pedagogy and preschool principals’ autonomy. However, preschool principals are relieved to have some self-monitored programmes at hand. Thus, these changes go hand in hand with the strengthening of professionalism and external marketisation.

Data infrastructures are the scaffolding of the present. This afterword centres on this claim by broadening the question that animates the special issue – what does lived data politics look like? – to the question of 'where' it is taking place today. It extends the gaze to the systemic transformation subtending contemporary data production, which I term 'governance by data infrastructure.' This pervasive form of number politics represents the most recent rearrangement in matters of governance of the social. It centers regulatory data infrastructures as the preferred mode of managing complexity, bringing the industry to the kernel of the state. Furthermore, the article asks what it means to think from an anthropological vantage point considering these developments, and what fruitful methodological avenues for research this may open. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data analytics have radically transformed data collection protocols in population censuses. Yet despite the unprecedented degree of automation these technologies afford, much of the critical work that goes into making data 'actionable' still hinges on the ethical labour of data operators in these novel human–machine settings. By following training activities and conducting interviews with technologists who worked on Brazil's 2022 population census, this article traces the workings of a fraud-detecting system designed to reduce costs and improve data quality and collection. Our ethnography identifies two competing modes of truth-making, which we term 'probabilistic' and 'performative', whereby numbers and census-takers 'tame' each other. Tracking human–machine data entanglements on the fringes of calculation centres helps unpack how futurities are affectively negotiated and woven into the political fabric of these political technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades now, scholars of quantification have been exposing the rationalist and modernist operations that lend numbers their political qualities. Yet recent anthropological scholarship has begun to show how data's ontological plasticity and messiness are constitutive of alternative political fields. This introduction brings these two streams of literature into productive conversation to rethink the means and meanings of number politics after datafication. We move beyond extant concerns about the governing and stabilising powers of numbers to highlight the moral and affective and the collective and subjective practices out of which data's political effects emerge. Foregrounding the everyday ethical work animating data worlds gives new insights into how numeric infrastructures thrive and fail within emerging socio-cultural and politico-legal milieus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the function of data journalism in a UK newsroom using Bourdieu's field theory. The collection of study data was conducted through in-depth interviews, utilising a qualitative research methodology. The data obtained revealed that data journalism, a sub-field of journalism, continues to develop in an interdisciplinary structure and creates a new type of habitus (data habitus) within the field of journalism. This study also shows that the data journalism team in the newspaper has moved from being niche to being established as one of the most active and effective main sections of the newsroom, and that data-driven journalism has the potential to influence other teams. Lastly, this study suggested that the newsroom is undergoing a process of datafication by indicating the newspaper's intention to develop data skills beyond the data journalism team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational services industry has grown internationally, and there has been an explosion in external programmes that teach basics and behavioural control, as well as administrative data programmes. This growth has affected the governance of preschools worldwide and spurred schoolification and marketisation. In this context, this study examines how the growth of the private education industry within the education system has influenced preschool principals' work in Iceland. Our critical theoretical perspective aims to explore how educational trends grounded in neoliberalism have shaped the work of preschool principals. The data consisted of a questionnaire distributed to all preschool principals in Iceland. The findings showed that schoolification, informed by educational authorities and the private education industry, has shaped pedagogy and preschool principals' autonomy. However, preschool principals are relieved to have some self-monitored programmes at hand. Thus, these changes go hand in hand with the strengthening of professionalism and external marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Filosofía (0034-8244) is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Datafication is changing from the value of concept to the value of layer for the present world. It describes every aspect of our lives with data. In this paper, the researchers put the datafication in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Also, the authors examine some aspects changed by datafication. The researchers look at several aspects (put in context with the industrial evolution) and also to the effect of datafication on several areas of human activity. By using a qualitative approach, the research examines the datafication and its various dimensions. The results suggest the need for robust, transparent systems to manage the complexity of data and advocate for ethical and privacy considerations. These insights are crucial for policymakers, businesses, and academics, providing a comprehensive understanding of the legal environment, societal impacts, and innovation potential in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how we can locate and understand infrastructural power in mobile infrastructures for datafication through dissecting third-party tracking via so-called software development kits (SDKs). As key material components of mobile infrastructures, SDKs enable app functionality, security, and access to data collection and use by third-party services. However, the methods for investigating SDKs and mobile datafication in general are fragile and in urgent need of development and critical discussion. We explore and discuss methodological pathways for understanding power in the mobile ecosystem. Through exemplifying empirical interventions, derived from a sample of 1129 apps used by 69 Danes participating in the Datafied Living research project, we investigate and discuss how Apple and Alphabet hold infrastructural power and perpetually consolidate their effective mobile duopoly while simultaneously protecting and enhancing their assets in related data markets (e.g. through mobile advertising). We argue that the current infrastructures for mobile datafication impede transparency, systematic democratic monitoring, and ultimately regulation while also limiting the critical capabilities of researchers, as well as open source and hacker environments who must constantly adjust their counter-intelligence measures and tools.

Ubiquitous datafication of children and families in educational and everyday settings is both a result of and catalyst for power asymmetries between digital platforms and their users. These platforms seek to know their users by extracting and analysing various streams of personal information, often discreetly. However, the users are rarely equipped to do the same to the platforms as information about these platforms is often obscured, convoluted, or simply unavailable. This article explores the possibilities of reversing such power imbalance via the design intervention of an Australia-focused educational technology (EdTech) database developed by the authors of this article. Employing a design intervention method, the database is a collection of publicly available information about EdTech companies and products that target young children and their parents or educators in Australia. This alternate commentary article presents and discusses the ongoing processes of developing the database to reflect on what it says about the power relations between EdTech providers and their users. It demonstrates how the database works as a pedagogical space where people learn how to critically unpack and think about contemporary EdTech platforms. The database is positioned as a point of convergence for different actors involved in children's digital learning to collectively understand what needs to be done to enact and protect children's digital rights in education.

Our everyday lives are increasingly digital: We meet with friends, search for information, watch films, and buy goods online. This generates data that is automatically collected and analyzed. The ability to deal with the resulting algorithmically selected and personalized content is essential to benefit from digital technologies, and for this, digital skills are crucial. Studies focusing on digital skills, their antecedents, and consequences have mostly relied on self-reported, one-time measurements. A deeper understanding of the measures of digital skills and the role such digital skills play in everyday life and over time is needed. To address these gaps, this article compares self-reported measures of digital skills and knowledge of datafication and algorithmization in everyday internet use and maps the evolution of their relevance for digital everyday life. To do so, this articles analyzes data from multiple cross-sectional surveys conducted from 2011 to 2023 with representative samples of Swiss internet users. First, the findings indicate that self-reported skills reflect internet users’ knowledge of algorithmization and datafication in everyday internet use. This renders the measure a decent tool for empirical studies. Second, the findings show that digital skills are associated with socioeconomic background, cyber-optimistic attitudes, usage time, use of social media, health trackers, voice assistants, ChatGPT, and feeling included in the information society. These relationships varied over time. This article provides longitudinal empirical evidence on the relevance of digital skills in a highly digitized country. The findings highlight that promoting digital skills can contribute to fostering more inclusive digital societies.

News media trust, and the lack thereof, has been a prominent topic of discussion among journalism scholars in recent years. In this article, we study young adults’ trust in news media from the perspectives of platformisation and datafication. For the empirical study, we collected interview data from 23 Finnish 19–25-year-old young adults and analysed it inductively with applied thematic analysis. Our analysis reveals that trust negotiation is relational and entails not accepted, but forced vulnerability in relation to news media and the platforms on which they operate. Unclarity about the agency of news media on social media platforms causes young adults to experience powerlessness and anxiety in the face of data collection, which in practice translates into indifference toward their data being used by both news media and social media platforms. We show that young adults face a variety of challenges when navigating the online (news) media environment, which as we identify, can result in three trust-diminishing confusions about content, platforms, and data. This may have profound effects on how journalism is viewed as a cornerstone of a democratic society.

Through the conceptual framework of datafication, dataism and dataveillance, this study investigates beliefs and attitudes regarding datafication and the related privacy and security concerns among individuals with Type 1 diabetes. Qualitative research was conducted through interviews among fifty-two individuals with Type 1 diabetes in Poland and Italy. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay between self-discipline and empowerment. The majority of interviewees emphasized the benefits of technologies for gaining a better understanding of their health condition and for more effective disease management. However, a minority of interviewees perceived the negative effects of datafication, including dataveillance, which leads to hyper-control of the disease, and dataism, characterized by excessive reliance on and dependency on technology. Critical beliefs about technologies fuelled rejection attitudes, leading some interviewees to suspend or abandon their use. Lastly, reflexivity on privacy and security issues appears to be low, particularly among older individuals with lower levels of education and socioeconomic status. This results in a poor understanding and underestimation of the potential risks associated with security and privacy. The findings increase the understanding of the factors that can facilitate or hinder the adoption of technology among people with diabetes.

In the American West, wildfires and earthquakes are increasingly threatening the archaeological, historical, and tribal resources that define the collective identity and connection with the past for millions of Americans. The loss of said resources diminishes societal understanding of the role cultural heritage plays in shaping our present and future. This paper examines the viability of employing stationary and SLAM-based terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, automated surface change detection, GIS, and WebGL visualization techniques to enhance the preservation of cultural resources in California. Our datafication approach combines multi-temporal remote sensing monitoring of historic features with legacy data and collaborative visualization to document and evaluate how environmental threats affect built heritage. We tested our methodology in response to recent environmental threats from wildfire and earthquakes at Bodie, an iconic Gold Rush-era boom town located on the California and Nevada border. Our multi-scale results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates highly accurate 3D snapshots of Bodie’s historic buildings before/after disturbance, or post-restoration, with surface change detection and online collaborative visualization of 3D geospatial data to monitor and preserve important cultural resources at the site. This study concludes that the proposed workflow enhances the monitoring of at-risk California’s cultural heritage and makes a call to action to employ remote sensing as a pathway to advanced planning.

Social media platforms are crucial sources of political information during election campaigns, with datafication processes underlying the algorithmic curation of newsfeeds. Recognizing the role of individuals in shaping datafication processes and leveraging the metaphor of news attraction, we study the impact of user curation and networks on mobilization and polarization. In a two-wave online panel survey (n = 943) conducted during the 2021 German federal elections, we investigate the influence of self-reported user decisions, such as following politicians, curating their newsfeed, and being part of politically interested networks, on changes in five democratic key variables: vote choice certainty, campaign participation, turnout, issue reinforcement, and affective polarization. Our findings indicate a mobilizing rather than polarizing effect of algorithmic election news exposure and highlight the relevance of users’ political networks on algorithmic platforms.

Teknolojideki son gelişmeler fiziksel dünyayla etkileşimimizi değiştirmekte, dijital dönüşüm bu süreci daha da hızlandırmaktadır. Yakın dönemde yaşanan COVID-19 pandemisi de fiziksel ve dijital dünyanın yakınsamasına vesile olarak dijitalleşmeyi bir adım öteye taşımış, verinin merkezi hale gelmesini mümkün kılmıştır. Dijital dönüşümün mevcut nihai aşaması olarak Metaverse ise, sanal dünya ile fiziksel dünya arasındaki karşıtlığı ortadan kaldırarak dijital zaman ve mekân deneyimini fiziksel olana yaklaştırma misyonuyla ortaya çıkmıştır. Öte yandan bu yeni gerçeklik evreninin merkezinde kullanıcıların davranışlarını bilinebilir, öngörülebilir ve hatta kontrol edilebilir kılan, günlük yaşam deneyimini prosedürlere ve hesaplamalara indirgeyen veri odaklı bir anlayış bulunmaktadır. Bu çerçevede, bu çalışma Metaverse’e giden yolu açan dijitalleşmenin ve zihniyet olarak veri odaklılığın yükselişinde COVID-19 pandemisinin önemli bir etkisi olduğunu, Metaverse’ün veri odaklı anlayışının mahremiyet, gözetim ve kontrol gibi etik sorunları derinleştireceğini ileri sürmektedir.

In Uruguay, as in many countries around the world, healthcare providers are looking to digital technologies to enhance service provision. This includes introducing new data-intensive systems that facilitate connections between healthcare providers and patients and maintaining records of these interactions. This article considers the numeric ability of older citizens to critically assess the implications of platformization and datafication within the Uruguayan healthcare system with a view to identifying implications for digital literacy programs. The ability of older people to manage their personal data within healthcare systems shapes their ability to enact citizenship and human rights. This reality came into sharp relief during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrating the extent to which core social services have become datafied and digitally mediated, as well as their potential to deepen digital divides where senior citizens are concerned. Critical perspectives on technological change, well-being, and ageing offer useful perspectives on this challenge. Drawing inspiration from these perspectives, in this article, we explore the results of a digital literacy initiative that worked with 16 seniors to explore their experiences of personal data collection within Uruguay’s new National Comprehensive Health System. Our approach simultaneously worked to build digital literacy while also revealing the complex relationships and disconnections between the ontological frameworks mapped onto healthcare by systems designers and the reality of older people. In the conclusions, we consider the implications of these observations for seniors’ digital literacy interventions that foster seniors’ critical understanding of their data subjectivity in the context of local healthcare systems.

Ethical principles, such as privacy, autonomy, and human rights, have been published to govern ethical data extraction and mining. These principles aim to protect individuals from unlawful data extraction for research, development, and other purposes. While these principles are necessary to protect individuals against unlawful data extraction and mining, I argue that they do not, in practice, provide solid foundations for a human-centred approach to data extraction, given the exponential growth of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism. I contend that it is best to reorient data-driven corporations to approach data extraction from a human-centred perspective, guided by collectivist principles, such as care, human dignity, and beneficence, which I develop from Ubuntu-centred African relational moral theory. I show how these principles can contest current principles, such as respect for autonomy, privacy, and human rights, to guide a human-centred approach to data extraction.

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Automated journalism is the focus of this research, which seeks to revisit the main concepts surrounding the practice that uses natural language generation to produce news. It is argued that this form of journalism combines investigation techniques with programming languages, database processing, statistical resources and traditional values of the profession. Empirically, the research analyzes the automated coverage initiative of 2020's municipal elections, conducted by the G1 portal, in Brazil. In the end, it is stated that speed and gains in scale justify the emergence of automated journalism. Furthermore, it is the volume of data and its processing that enables such automation of news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary info-proliferation is taking the ideal of a solid technological rationalism to its extreme point: the depletion of all bodies into 'informational cuts', orderable bits and pieces of data fabric. The present contribution will discuss this process of datafication, trying to avoid any polarization along the 'pro' or 'anti' dualism, and any consequent excess of enthusiasm or critique. For this purpose, the essay will take the form of a stroll across post-digital culture, alternatively under the effects of a 'red and a blue pill' as the two main points of view already exemplified, in 1999, by Morpheus in the famous sci-fi movie The Matrix. To these two points of view, respectively identifiable as digital critique (going down the deep rabbit hole, and seeing that computers are playing today a leading role in what Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari have called 'capitalist schizophrenia'), or digital potential (remaining in a world of numeric dreams, a world populated not only by humans but also by bots, autonomous computer programs that are becoming increasingly able not only to post, but also to understand content and interact with people and, most importantly, to take aesth/ethical decisions), a yellow one will be added, which can be recognized as that of 'hacker culture', at the same time suggesting that, instead of a dialectical contraposition between two different perceptual and cognitive modalities, post-digital culture can be more easily discussed through a multiplication of possible perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News media trust, and the lack thereof, has been a prominent topic of discussion among journalism scholars in recent years. In this article, we study young adults' trust in news media from the perspectives of platformisation and datafication. For the empirical study, we collected interview data from 23 Finnish 19--25-year-old young adults and analysed it inductively with applied thematic analysis. Our analysis reveals that trust negotiation is relational and entails not accepted, but forced vulnerability in relation to news media and the platforms on which they operate. Unclarity about the agency of news media on social media platforms causes young adults to experience powerlessness and anxiety in the face of data collection, which in practice translates into indifference toward their data being used by both news media and social media platforms. We show that young adults face a variety of challenges when navigating the online (news) media environment, which as we identify, can result in three trust-diminishing confusions about content, platforms, and data. This may have profound effects on how journalism is viewed as a cornerstone of a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]