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Reading Data Selves
- 2. SHARP Professor in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Leader of the Vitalities Lab Sociology of health; STS; Communication technology and digital media studies; Cultural studies; Social theory; Sociological methodology and research methods. DEBORAHLUPTON
- 3. PUBLICATION 19 books 9 edited volumes over 240 articles and book chapters
- 5. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction 1 ‘Know Thyself’: Self-tracking Practices and Technologies 2 ‘New Hybrid Beings’: Theoretical Perspectives 3 ‘An Optimal Human Being’: the Body and Self in Self-Tracking Cultures 4 ‘You are Your Data’: Personal Data Meanings, Practices and Materialisations 5 ‘Data’s Capacity for Betrayal’: Personal Data Politics Conclusion References Index sociomaterial perspectives THEQUANTIFIEDSELF(2016) lively data
- 6. SELFTRACKER https://www.fabrique.nl/blog/2020/2/dark-side-self-tracking/ Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scienti f ic advancement and its bene f its. — Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 27
- 7. LIVELYDATA 1. they are generated from life itself, in terms of documenting humans’ bodies and selves 2. they are labile and f luid, open to constant repurposing by a range of actors and agencies 3. they have potential e ff ects on the conduct of life and life opportunities. 4. they have signi f icant implications for livelihoods (those using these data in the data mining, insurance and data science industries, for instance).
- 8. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction 2 More-than-Human Perspectives 3 Materialising Data 4 Doing Data 5 Sharing and Exploiting Data Final Thoughts KEYWORDS more-than-human human-data assemblage lively data and thing-power agential cut data sense DATASELVES(2020)
- 9. Central to my argument is that in the face of the continuing depersonalization and dehumanization of details about people's bodies and lives that have been rendered into digital data, a new onto-ethico-epistemological position should be developed that reinvests human-data assemblages with di ff erent meanings and reconceptualizes what we mean by 'personal data' - and indeed, how we think about and treat our 'data selves'. (20)
- 10. The phenomenon of personal digital data poses a challenge at an ontological level. Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary Western societies. Personal data are both private and public. They could be considered to be owned by, and part of, the people who have generated them, but these details are also accessed and used by a multitude of other actors and agencies. At a deeper level, personal data challenge the ontological boundaries between the binary oppositions of Self/Other, nature/ culture, human/nonhuman and living/dead. (12-13) THEMAINARGUMENT
- 11. My concern is with the relationships of humans with non-organic things——digital technologies in particular——and how these engagements are infused with vitalities and vibrancies. I use the term ‘more-than-human' to acknowledge that human bodies/selves are always already distributed phenomena, interembodied with other humans and with nonhumans, multiple and open to the world. Adopting this approach, human-data assemblages can be viewed as ever-changing forms of lively materialities. (14) THEMAINARGUMENT
- 12. 1.MORE-THAN-HUMANVITALITIES inspired by Donna Haraway and feminist new materialisms human-data assemblages relational agency & vital materialism This way of thinking goes to the heart of how we might begin to theorize our data selves in the context of vitalities and agencies, highlighting the relationality and sociality that connect humans with technologies. We might also think about how personal data not only cohabit with us but are part of us, co-evolving and growing together. These human-data assemblages are combinations of nature/culture. The companion species and compost tropes suggest both the vitality of these assemblages and also the possibilities of developing a productive relationship, recognizing our mutual interdependencies, vulnerabilities and potentials. (26-27)
- 14. 2.INTRA-ACTION&AGENTIALCUTS Karen Barad agency is not an attribute but the ongoing recon f igurings of the world intra-action (vs inter-action): distributed and performative nature of agency co-constitutive / becoming-with agential cuts An agential cut identi f ies the boundaries of a phenomenon, grouping certain attributes together as part of this enactment as the same time as other attributes are excluded. Agential cuts make meaning from the potentially in f inite sources that are available. As such, they are ways of making matter come to matter - indeed, of mattering. (28) inter- (between) / intra- (from within)
- 17. 3.THING-POWERANDENCHANTMENT Jane Bennet a ff ects + vitalities => thing-power: a dynamic f low of energy between and with the components of assemblages the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to product e ff ects dramatic and subtle enchantment: how mundane activities and objects acquire and inspire strong a ff ects that animate investments and attachments.
- 18. DATAREMAINS Personal data, in other words, can be viewed as a new type of human remains, one that is potentially open to a multitude of repurposing and recon f iguring, leading to many kinds of value for a diverse range of actors. Like human remains, personal data may also lose their potency and vibrancy, their agential capacities to a ff ect and be a ff ected. (40)
- 19. CREEPYDATA Black Mirror “Be Right Back” (TV Episode 2013) The abject is that human or nonhuman thing that arouses feelings of discomfort and disgust because it f louts cultural boundaries such as those routinely de f ined between human/nonhuman, Self/Other, female/male and inside/outside……Ambivalence, therefore, is a strong element of abjection and creepiness, as people are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the individual or object that is engendering these feelings. (57)
- 23. SELF-TRACKING a practice of human-data assemblage ; an intra-action of human bodies and technological tools bring previously latent bodily process into view and consciousness a profound act of sel f hood and embodiment
- 24. generated the agential capacities of self- improvement, exerting control, identifying patterns, achieving goals, feeling better and being responsible attentive labour and articulation: a matter of connecting the metrics with the lived sensory and a ff ective experiences of one's body and the other elements that are important in data sense-making SELF-TRACKING
- 25. DATAAFFECTS a ff ective feelings, responses, and a ff ective exchanges
- 26. DATASENSE The concept of data sense, as I seek to develop it, brings the body back in, acknowledging that we learn in and through our bodies. It incorporates the entanglements of the digital sensors with the human senses in the process of sense-making. In these enactments, bodies are not only knowing and perceiving (Latimer 2008), but they are sensing, responding to and assessing the information returned by digital sensors. (76) From this perspective, data are always part of the humans who claim to 'discover' and 'analyse' them. Rather than seek neutrality and scienti f ic objectivity - to remove human 'bias' - from data, they are viewed as ways to make certain agential cuts to achieve insights, as materialisms that create experiences at the same time as they seek to represent these experiences (Barad 2007; St Pierre 2013; Koro-Ljungberg et al. 2017). Human-data assemblages generate relational connections, a ff ective forces and agential capacities. From this approach, data can never be 'objective' or 'unbiased', as positivist researchers often claim. (77)
- 27. QUICKNOTSONPRIVACYANDDATAETHICS At another level of ethical inquiry, we should ask whose interests are served or neglected when agential cuts are made in response to digital datasets? (124) By adopting an a ff irmative ethics, I am working towards an 'ethics of care' (de la Bellacasa 2012) that can perhaps contribute to a new way of conceptualizing personal data by re- humanizing them: showing how they make humans and make a di ff erence in people's lives in ways that can be productive but also limiting.……Identifying the complex ways in which these a ff ordances operate, and whose interests they serve, can begin to get to the heart of the moral, political and ethical implications concerning data selves. What ethical relations should we have with our data assemblages? What should our responsibilities be to and with them? What kinds of agential capacities are opened up or closed o ff ? (123)
- 28. THANKYOU
- 29. FORDISCUSSION