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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.

In this article, we take issue with an idea of autonomous and efficient automation that is upheld through the paradoxical conjunction of a flawed vision of the technological fix and the under-acknowledged human work required to fill in the gaps between machines and users. Our argument is based on two case studies that sit at opposite tails of automation processes: the front end of self-service checkouts and the back end of content moderation. This juxtaposition allows us to surface three themes on how the hype around automation is enabled by human interventions: the ad-hoc sociality in situated practices of automation, the capture of mundane expertise, and the inverted assistance of humans to machines. We argue that this human fix is not a temporary repair of malfunction, but a permanent and constitutive feature of automated systems.

Whistleblowers have been instrumental in revealing the massive investments in state-sponsored and corporate digital surveillance and disinformation. Their personal accounts of what went on behind the scenes are usually presented in popular books marketed as offering insider stories. By interrogating the recapitulations of veteran data consultants, our article is interested in the way in which whistleblowers configure their role and place themselves in the context of their story in terms of agency and accountability. We examine and compare three recollections: Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record , Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck , and Brittany Kaiser’s Targeted . Our analysis shows how these high-profile memoirs offer a look that is both intimate and distant. They at once promise to get close to and even behind what has escaped public scrutiny and in return try to dissociate themselves from their former trade. Their position of privileged precarity, which results from the casualization of digital labor, allows these data consultants to quickly become insiders while staying uncomfortable with many of the taken-for-granted ideological convictions and organizational orders. Rationalizing their involvement as disoriented diligence affords the whistleblowers the capacity to craft a story of enchantment, delusion, and subsequent awakening. Both their experiences and their position enable these disenthralled renegades to style themselves as honest moral arbiters in service of the public interest and brokers of exclusive knowledge.

The smart village is digitally networked and participatory. Its “smartness”, in other words, should be based on interaction between technological infrastructures and civic engagement. While this vision has inspired European policymaking and public discourse in recent years, understanding of the interaction between digitalization and civic participation in rural areas remains limited. In order to fill this gap, this paper offers a systematic review of journal contributions situated at the intersection of digitalization, participatory efforts and rural development. Overall, our study shows that digital rural development and its interplay with participation processes is still a niche concern in scientific journals. We find that articles focus primarily on projects seeking to increase broadband capacity. Second, they focus on the spatial characteristics of rural areas, where social relations and intermediaries play an important role. Third, they emphasize the integration of topdown measures with bottom-up initiatives. There is no single, dominant theoretical approach conceptualizing the intertwining of digitalization and civic participation processes in rural areas. It is evident that local social networks are strengthened and maintained through both analogue and digital formats. Furthermore, the literature provides evidence that sustainable forms of digital engagement are based on civil society initiatives that are supported and accompanied by administrative measures.

Conference Report: Workshop Power and Politics of Mundane Memories. Tracing, Templating and Transforming Everyday Life. London (March 24, 2017), King’s College London.

Der Artikel erfasst kommunikationswissenschaftliche Theoriearbeit zwischen Komplexitätssteigerung und Komplexitätsreduzierung. Zunächst wird die Dynamik theoretischer Entwicklungen in der Kommunikationswissenschaft auf das Zusammenspiel interdisziplinärer und innerdisziplinärer konzeptueller Tendenzen sowie der Transformation empirischer Gegenstandsbereiche zurückgeführt. Dann werden einschlägige Ansätze diskutiert, die Bedingungen, Vorgänge oder Konsequenzen von Kommunikationsprozessen und Mediensystemen in ihrer Komplexität erfassen wollen. Im Ergebnis werden die Beschäftigung mit Komplexität als Bezugspunkt kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung, die begrifflich substanzielle Fassung von Komplexität und die Beschäftigung mit den Ambivalenzen von Komplexität erörtert. Damit trägt der Überblicksbeitrag zur weiteren theoretischen Fundierung der Kommunikationswissenschaft als sich ausdifferenzierendes Fach, zu seiner Anbindung an Debatten anderer Disziplinen und zur Reflexion der Veränderungen seiner Gegenstände bei.

Usually, the alluring notion of “affordances” comes with the idea that technology makes some activities possible while constraining others. Our article departs from this dichotomic view and seeks to appreciate the multiplicity of socio-material prefiguration. Discussing three empirical examples from human–robot communication, we show that the affordances of “smart” technologies are not acted out in a smooth, planned process or through rational action alone. Rather, affordances are collective achievements that emerge within the interplay of humans and machines. This challenges the separation into active use and passive usability. It also demands us that we think through what types of agency are associated with these kinds of agents and what we take to define agency at all. Agency rests, we argue, on the capability to engage in intelligible encounters; it builds on purposive activities even though they might only realize a limited repertoire of tasks.

Der Artikel diskutiert den Beitrag der Praxistheorien für die kulturalistische Kommunikations- und Medienforschung. Ausgehend von sozialphilosophischen und kultursoziologischen Vorhaben, ein praxistheoretisches Paradigma zu etablieren, werden erstens dessen Basisannahmen entlang der Prinzipien Rekursivität und Relationalität erläutert. Zweitens werden praxistheoretisch reflektierte oder kongruente kommunikationswissenschaftliche Traditionen erfasst. Während zwar eine bisher nur sporadische explizite Auseinandersetzung mit Praxistheorien festzustellen ist, finden sich indessen eine Reihe von Ansätzen der Beschäftigung mit einem komplementären Programm im Rahmen der Cultural Studies und der selektiven Adaption einzelner praxistheoretisch verorteter Autoren, allen voran Bourdieu und Giddens. Drittens wird erörtert, für welche Forschungsfelder und Ansätze kulturalistischer Kommunikations- und Medienforschung die Praxistheorien Impulse geben können. Dabei werden die Perspektiven für die Analyse des Wandels kollektiver Mediennutzung, des Konstituierens alltäglichen Medienumgangs und des wechselseitigen Ausgestaltens von Medientechnologien und medienbezogenen Praktiken ausgeführt.

The article examines the construction of “Big Data” in media discourse. Rather than asking what Big Data really is or is not, it deals with the discursive work that goes into making Big Data a socially relevant phenomenon and problem in the first place. It starts from the idea that in modern societies the public understanding of technology is largely driven by a media-based discourse, which is a key arena for circulating collectively shared meanings. This largely ignored dimension invites us to appreciate what matters to journalists and the wider public when discussing the collection and use of data. To this end, our study looks at how Big Data is framed in terms of the governmental use of large datasets as a contentious area of data application. It reconstructs the perspectives surrounding the so-called “Handygate” affair in Germany based on broadcast news and social media conversations. In this incident, state authorities collected and analyzed mobile phone data through a radio cell query during events to commemorate the Dresden bombing in February 2011. We employ a qualitative discourse analysis that allows us to reconstruct the conceptualizations of Big Data as a proper instrument for criminal prosecution or an unjustified infringement of constitutional rights.

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit den diskursiven Prozessen der Wissenskonstitution in Wikipedia. Den theoretischen Rahmen dafür bildet Foucaults Konzept einer ‚genealogischen’ Analyse von Macht/Wissen-Regimen. In einem ersten Schritt werde ich zunächst das allgemeine Wiki-Prinzip und die Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia im Speziellen knapp skizzieren. Daran anschließend entfaltet der Artikel zweitens den theoretischen Hintergrund, indem zunächst Typen, Ebenen und Funktionen des Widerspruches, wie sie Foucault in der Archäologie des Wissens anführt, präsentiert werden. Darauf aufbauend setze ich mich drittens mit Foucaults Überlegungen zum Konzept ‚Genealogie’ auseinander. Neben den in der Ordnung des Diskurses postulierten Kontrollprozeduren in Diskursen sollen weiterführend die von ihm nur in Zügen umrissenen Ideen bezüglich diskursiver Rituale und Diskursensembles vorgestellt werden. Im Anschluss daran diskutiere ich Macht/Wissen als zentrales Element seiner Argumentation. Viertens werden anhand zweier Beispielpassagen aus der Diskussionsseite des Wikipedia-Artikels „Verschwörungstheorie“ die Mechanismen der Exklusionsprozesse und diskursiven Konflikte um Deutungsmacht herausgearbeitet. Dabei wird deutlich, dass in den Wissenskonstitutionsprozessen eines Wikipedia-Artikels diskursive Regime wirksam sind, mittels derer zum einen Aussagen auf ihre Plausibilität und Akzeptabilität hin überprüft, angenommen oder verworfen und zum anderen die äußernden Subjekte bestätigt, diszipliniert und gegebenenfalls ausgeschlossen werden.