#DATAFICATION

[raffaellopalandri]

Commodified Attention and the Ontological Erosion of the Self: Against the Economies of Captured Presence

In a civilisation that has rendered time a unit of economic calculation and attention a monetisable extract, we must ask: what becomes of being when it is no longer allowed to dwell in duration, but instead is continuously summoned to perform, react, and produce data for unseen ends? Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com The human subject, once grounded in temporal interiority, reflexive…

[asli-tan]

Do You Believe in Life After Tech? - A Critical Analysis of the Self-Optimization Focused Longevity Practices 

The year is 2025. For an average human living in the territories dressed with internet cables, the day starts by grabbing the smartphone and consuming whatever the algorithm has to offer. From grocery shopping to becoming a millionaire overnight through crypto trades, everything seems possible from behind the screen. Societies are increasingly shaped by the very algorithms that dictate behaviors, tastes, and desires. From the frenzy of aesthetic surgery trends to the instantaneous viral success of products, from the commodification of reality to the proliferation of memes, we have become subjects of a culture where everything is recontextualized, reshaped, and hyper-real. Our daily lives and social habits are shaped by the algorithm we constantly labor to. The lines between the real and the simulated blur further, as Baudrillard whispers from the early days of the internet, "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." (Baudrillard 1994:79). Here, meaning becomes a construct of virtuality, a mere image or simulation of the real. As our perception of reality becomes distorted in an AI-mediated fashion, whose pace of progress is beyond our perception of the pace of living, the human condition and social order are caught in a tension between the expectations of a world driven by accelerating technological advancements and the limitations of societies struggling to keep up. The contemporary condition whispers to us to either try and stay relevant or stay out of the picture. But even then, salvation is not guaranteed. In fact, nothing is guaranteed except the increasing quest for the relentless advance of an unchecked, accelerationist future. 

This paper examines how the implications of contemporary accelerationist discourses of progress imply biopower and commodification of the subject by analyzing the longevity industry and public figures such as Bryan Johnson and viral self-optimization trends online. Through a critical analysis of the longevity industry, the paper aims to critically engage with the societal repercussions of accelerationist ideas.

[libraryben]

Data increasingly forms the backbone of systems and processes that shape how we do things and how we relate to each other. Datafication – the uptake of data to reorganize social processes – is reshaping everything from loyalty programs and digital identification systems to credit card payments and rental pricing platforms. Artificial intelligence accelerates these processes.

Making sense of what these changes mean for our everyday lives is no easy task. Datafied systems are highly technical and designed to be convenient and seamless; we tend to encounter them in brief moments of individualized transaction, which makes them difficult to see, let alone read, and their illegibility makes them very challenging to respond to. Communing Data Literacy offers a novel set of concepts and tools to help people make sense of how technology is altering their communities and their social interactions. Building on three years of design research by digital rights organizations in Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the volume analyzes people’s everyday experiences with datafication, rethinking data from the perspective of community and offering practical techniques for community engagement.

Communing Data Literacy pushes back against the individualism and technocentrism of Western data literacy practice and scholarship, providing English readers the opportunity to engage with Latin American perspectives.

[sociologyoffashion]

This week, our class benefitted from a guest lecture from Instagram sewing influencer, @pinkmimosabyjacinta, which really put the readings on the datafication of influencer work in context. Jacinta made clear how she balances her time online with her real day job due to the fact that she largely treats influencing as a hobby rather than as a way to make money. The readings opened up a vigorous class discussion later in the week, wherein we analyzed some examples of fashion influencers and bloggers. Students noted a number of ways beyond social media in which our lives are quantified and made into data. It is my hope this sets students up for some thoughtful engagement with our second documentary film of the semester next week.

- Dr. Buggs

[innovabilita]

Rischi e Opportunità della Datafication

sai che fai parte della #datafication ?

Avete mai provato a chiedere a Chat-GPt-4: che fine fanno i nostri dati? Siamo entrati nel web2 senza una grande consapevolezza degli utenti di internet in una infosfera in cui generiamo una quantità enorme di dati. Non solo quando navighiamo su Internet o usiamo i social, ma anche nelle azioni più normali della nostra vita quotidiana: quando ordiniamo un film su Netflix, quando utilizziamo la…

[librarianrafia]

"It is easy to take for granted the value of data. It has come to seem self-evidently useful, as necessary and natural as water. It doesn’t even matter what has been measured and datafied; data in the abstract, as an idea, is taken to be a good thing, and of course there should be more of it, to enrich our knowledge of the world and to make anything that is “data-driven” work better. If data is being collected but not leveraged, why bother? Why have an archive of implosion images if not to simulate any implosion image imaginable?

But to accept that at face value would be to neglect the vast infrastructure involved not merely in collecting it and making it useful and tradable, but also establishing its reputation for objectivity. Measurement is an ideology; among its central tenets is that there is no such thing as datafication but just data itself, naturally given by the things in themselves. It presents itself as a form of representation that transcends representation: Data is no longer about the world but is instead taken to be the world itself, as though materiality were a matter not of atoms but of information. The image of an implosion is an implosion.

Likewise, this ideology would persuade us to ignore the market for data, which shapes what is measured and how, and have us believe it is more like a natural resource, a found material waiting for refinement rather than a structured informational good without any natural status at all. Implosions just happen.

Calls to measure everything and collect as much data as possible are offered as efficient strategies to better grasp the world as it is. But measurement is an act of power, not observation. Datafication always reifies an existing distribution of power that grants the measurers the ability to decide which aspects of the world count and which ones don’t. Having measurements taken as objective — having representations be treated as realities — requires power and recurrent processes of legitimation."

...

Restating that in the terms outlined above, an archive recognizes the power relations intrinsic to measurement (and representation in general) whereas a dataset suppresses them (helping entrench the power relations that underwrite the data it assembles). An archive attempts to retain how and why representations were made, and a dataset disregards all that to allow representations to masquerade as universal facts. When representations become data, they reinforce the utility of the infrastructures (algorithmic decision-making systems, AI models, etc.) developed to exploit them. And that infrastructure in turn reinforces the power relations authorizing the data.

[bccunited]

Datafication helps businesses unleash the true power of data and improves your business’ ability to predict strengths, weaknesses, potential, possibilities and outcomes accurately.

For More Visit: https://www.bccunited.com/software/data-analytics-services/

[subhajyotimondal]

The Transformative Power of Datafication in Healthcare

In recent years, the healthcare sector has undergone a revolutionary transformation through datafication — the conversion of diverse healthcare elements into digital data. This shift to a data-driven healthcare ecosystem is reshaping the landscape, enhancing decision-making, personalizing treatments, and improving patient outcomes. In this article, we delve into the significance of datafication in health, its transformative effects, and the benefits it brings to both patients and the industry.

The Rise of Datafication in Health

Healthcare, inherently data-rich, historically grappled with analog and paper-based formats, impeding effective analysis. The digital revolution introduced electronic health records (EHRs) and digital systems, enabling the structured collection, storage, and analysis of health data.

Transforming Health Data into Actionable Insights

Datafication empowers healthcare providers to convert raw health data into actionable insights using advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms. This enables evidence-based decision-making, influencing treatment plans, operational efficiencies, resource allocation, and public health strategies.

Personalized Medicine and Treatment

Datafication facilitates personalized medicine by analyzing individual patient data, tailoring treatment plans based on genetic makeup, lifestyle, and medical history. This approach enhances treatment effectiveness while minimizing side effects.

Predictive Analytics for Disease Prevention

Datafication, through predictive analytics, identifies potential health risks and diseases early by analyzing historical health data. This proactive intervention improves outcomes and reduces healthcare costs.

Benefits of Datafication in Health

The integration of datafication in health yields benefits across patient care, research, innovation, and resource allocation:

Enhanced Patient Care and Outcomes: Real-time monitoring through datafication enables timely interventions, resulting in better medical treatment and improved health outcomes.

Research and Innovation: The vast pool of health data supports research-driven innovations and advancements in healthcare.

Efficient Resource Allocation: Datafication aids in optimizing resource allocation, reducing costs, and increasing operational effectiveness.

The Role of Data in Healthcare

The pivotal role of data in healthcare includes informed decision-making, personalized medicine, research and innovation, healthcare operations and efficiency, healthcare policy and planning, telemedicine and remote monitoring, early disease detection and prevention, quality improvement and outcome monitoring, patient engagement and empowerment, and population health management.

Datafication is reshaping the future of healthcare by harnessing data’s power to drive informed decision-making, improve patient outcomes, and enhance operational efficiencies. As technology advances, embracing datafication becomes crucial in realizing a personalized, efficient healthcare ecosystem focused on delivering the best care possible.

[wellnoe]

listen i don't think this is a bad performance.

we are being SO optimistic today. anyway to-do list:

bake bread

prep eggs

chop vegetables

read book 1

read book 2

read book 3

read book 4

read book 5

read book 6

[fatehbaz]

Goldstein and Mahmoudi point to what, on appearance, is a relatively new phenomenon: namely the use of digital technologies in contemporary forms of surveillance and policing, and the way in which they turn the body into the border. [...] [T]he datafication of human life becomes an industry in its own right [...] [with the concept of] “surveillance capitalism” - a system based on capturing behavioral data and using it for commercial purposes [...] [which] emerged in the early 2000s [...].

In contrast, scholarship on colonialism, slavery, and plantation capitalism enables us to understand how racial surveillance capitalism has existed since the grid cities of sixteenth-century Spanish Mexico (Mirzoeff 2020). In short, and as Simone Browne (2015, 10) has shown, “surveillance is nothing new to black folks.” [...]

[S]urveillance in the service of racial capitalism has historically aided three interconnected goals: (1) the control of movement of certain - predominantly racialized - bodies through means of identification; (2) the control of labor to increase productivity and output; and (3) the generation of knowledge about the colony and its native inhabitants in order to “maintain” the colonies [...].

---

Identification documents and practices can, like so many other surveillance technologies, be traced back to the Middle Passage [...]. [T]he movement of captives was controlled through [...] slave passes, slave patrols [...]. Similar strategies of using wanted posters and passes were put in place to control the movement of indentured white laborers from England and Ireland. [...]

Fingerprinting, for example, was developed in India because colonial officials could not tell people apart [...].

In Algeria, the French dominated the colonized population by issuing internal passports, creating internal limits on movement for certain groups, and establishing camps for landless peasants [...]. In South Africa, meanwhile, the movement of the Black population was controlled through the “pass laws”: an internal passport system designed to confine Black South Africans into Bantustans and ensure a steady supply of super-exploitable labor [...].

On the plantation itself, two forms of surveillance emerged - both with the underlying aim of increasing productivity and output. One was in the form of daily notetaking by plantation and slave owners. [...] Second, [...] a combination of surveillance, accounting, and violence was used to make slave labor in the cotton fields more “efficient.” [...] [S]imilar logics of quotas and surveillance still reverberate in today's labor management systems. Finally, surveillance was also essential to the management of the colonies. It occurred through [...] practices like fingerprinting and the passport [...]. [P]hotographs were used after colonial rebellions, in 1857 in India and in 1865 in Jamaica, to better identify the local population and identify “racial types.” To control different Indian communities deemed criminal and vagrant, the British instituted a system of registration where [...] [particular people] were not allowed to sleep away from their villages without prior permission [...].

---

In sum, when thinking about so-called surveillance capitalism today, it is essential to recognize that the logics that underpin these technologies are not new, but were developed and tested in the management of racialized minorities during the colonial era with a similar end goal, namely to control, order, and undermine the poor, colonized, enslaved, and indentured; to create a vulnerable and super-exploitable workforce; and to increase efficiency in production and foster accumulation. Consequently, while the (digital) technologies used for surveillance might have changed, the logics underpinning them have not.

---

All text above by: Sabrina Axster and Ida Danewid. In a section from an article co-authored by Sabrina Axster, Ida Danewid, Asher Goldstein, Matt Mahmoudi, Cemal Burak Tansel, and Lauren Wilcox. "Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago: Rethinking the Neoliberal Security State". International Political Sociology Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2021, pages 415-439. Published June 2021. At: doi dot org slash 10.1093/ips/olabo013. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fanhackers]

 Acafannish Sampler: Otherwise Titled, “Three Things Make a Post”

Below find excerpts from three essays in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa 2021). These essays are on subjects that, to my mind, are under-researched: fan art, Black cosplay, and quantitative approaches to fandom:

“Unfortunately, while fan studies scholarship boasts a growing stack of books, chapters, and journal articles on fan fiction, fan art remains comparatively understudied. The extant writings tend to focus on specific instances of fan art creation instead of considering fan art more broadly or theoretically. This seems like a strange oversight, as the explosion of fan art has occurred alongside that of fan fiction, taking advantage of many of the same social media spaces, technologies, and fan communities. Fan art is a social practice, a frequent means of transcultural communication, an engaged response to media, a visual text, and sometimes a physical object. By studying fan art, we can learn a great deal about the fan communities who produce and share it. 

An important characteristic of fan art as a genre is that it is generally designed to be read, that is, for a viewer to recognize and understand what it is meant to represent and reference. Iconography is a key tool for understanding how much of this readability functions. Art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form. This chapter considers the role of iconography in making fan art readable, as well as looking at how this iconography can develop and what these iconographic choices can tell us about fans and fandoms.”  

–EJ Nielsen, “The Iconography of Fan Art”

~ ~ ~

“In this chapter, I shed light on the activities of Black cosplayers usually rendered invisible because of their racialized performance of cosplay. The performance and skill of Black fans tend to go unheard, so I focus on the Black cosplayer movement, where Black cosplayers attempt to be seen by the general public and each other. The focus on Black cosplay provides a deeper understanding of identity performance in fandom and cultural studies more broadly. I begin by summarizing what cosplay is and the work done in the fandom studies field that can help us understand how Black fans interact with cosplay and the struggles they face. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the tweets and images posted since 2015 under the hashtag #28DaysOfBlackCosplay. This movement shows how the online Black fan community uses cosplay to resist the hierarchical structure in fandoms and gain visibility.” 

–Alex Thomas, “The Dual Imagining: Afrofuturism. Queer Performance, and Black Cosplayers”

~ ~ ~

“Fan studies has always been robustly interdisciplinary. Its methodological and epistemological diversity should be celebrated and expanded. This chapter attempts to do both by presenting a case for the increased role of quantitative and computational tools and methods and for the kind of data-informed approaches to fandom and fanworks they make possible. Such approaches have struggled to find any real purchase in the field, which is somewhat puzzling given content industries’ increasing emphasis on the “datafication” of media audiences in general and fannish audiences in particular. Fan studies will need to engage with this trend and its ramifications, as well as with the algorithmic culture of which they are both cause and effect. The value of quantitative and computational tools and methods is hardly confined to this one area. On the contrary, when thoughtfully applied to data generated by and about fans, fandom, and fanworks, these tools and methods are very likely to make visible patterns, trends, relationships, networks, and (dis)continuities therein that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to discern.” 

--Josh Stenger, “The Datafication of Fandom: Or How I Stopped Watching the DC Arrowverse on The CW and Learned to Mine Fanwork Metadata”

[raffaellopalandri]

The Error of the Human: Ontologies of Rupture, Extinction, and Exclusion – Part 2

To think beyond the human is not to look forward in time, projecting fantasies of technological transcendence or speculative evolution, but rather to look downward and inward, toward the voids, fissures, and lacunae that have always constituted the human as a metaphysical fiction. In this, the inhuman does not follow the human. It undercuts it, diffuses it, renders it inoperative. It is not a…

[septemberfruits]

I didn't study all of spring break, which is my right as a student, but it's back to the grind.

"Every time it feels like society has reached peak appification - in which our "everyday activities and routines are being expressed through, carried out by, and experienced as apps" - another fact of users' lives is identified and targeted for datafication,"

-Chsiolm and Hartman-Caverly. "Privacy Literacy: From Doomscrolling to Digital Wellness."

[libraryben]

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive "big data" regimes. Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data. While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

[erinrobinson-exe]

A digital twin is a computational model of a person, often visual, behavioural, or data-driven, that reflects, replicates, or simulates aspects of their identity. Everyone who exists online has one. Much of my current work engages with my own digital representation as a way to reflect on how identity is mediated, constructed, and abstracted through computational systems.

The notion of twinship holds a personal significance: my mother had a twin, and twins recur frequently in my family. This recurring structure of doubling forms a backdrop to my interest in digital replication as a condition of contemporary existence. The digital twin is both an extension and an abstraction: a curated representation of the self, deliberately constructed, yet ultimately separable and operable beyond the individual’s control. With my digital twin, I consider the tension between the intimacy of self-representation and the detachment of datafication. A digital twin may originate from my being, but once encoded, it becomes part of a broader system in which bodies are rendered as data, subject to circulation, appropriation, and extraction.

Within this framework, I’m also interested in how digital twinship intersects with the enactment of fantasy, particularly the kinds of aesthetic worlds we construct online, such as cottagecore, soft girl, or pastoral dreamscapes. These digitally circulated styles function as affective surrogates for experiences that are materially inaccessible, offering a way to inhabit a fantasy of slowness, domesticity, or nature via technological mediation. In this sense, the digital twin becomes a vessel for desires that exceed the constraints of contemporary life, performing versions of the self that are both idealised and structurally impossible.

This entanglement of the personal, the aesthetic, and the algorithmic also raises questions about what lingers after the body, how digital selves persist, circulate, and mutate across time. I’m interested in the afterlife of these representations both as a form of legacy and memory, and additionally as ongoing sites of fantasy, appropriation, and technological reproduction. In this way, digital identity becomes less a record of being than a platform for speculative becoming.

[yesornopolls]

people who have done voice training of the transgender variety: Did you use spectrograms, pitch monitors, or other "voice datafication" tools?