Living with Data: Aligning Data Studies and Data Activism Through a Focus on Everyday Experiences of Datafication

It is now widely accepted that data are oiling the twenty-first century (Toonders 2014). Data gathering and tracking are practically universal, and datafication (the quantification of aspects of life previously experienced in qualitative, non-numeric form, such as communication, relationships, health and fitness, transport and mobility, democratic participation, leisure and consumption) is a transformation disrupting the social world in all its forms (Couldry 2016). Statistics confirm the assertion that the datafication of almost everything is growing relentlessly: in 2012 it was claimed that 90% of the world’s data had been created in the previous two years (IBM 2012), and a future 40% annual rise in data generation has been estimated (Manyika et al. 2011). Less commonly noted is the place of everyday experience in the machine of datafication. The Berliner Gazette (nd) has claimed that 75% of these newly available data are by-products of people’s everyday activities, and Michael and Lupton also note the centrality of the everyday in the current Big Data moment: Human actors contribute to big datasets when they engage in activities such as making calls and using apps on mobile phones, using online search engines such as Google, purchasing goods or services online or taking part in customer loyalty programmes, uploading contributions to social media platforms, using wearable self-tracking devices or moving around in spaces that are equipped with digital sensing or recording devices (Michael and Lupton 2015, 104). Despite the significance of such everyday practices in the production of large-scale data, little attention has been paid to people’s thoughts and feelings about these data-producing processes. These issues have not, on the whole, been the focus of the emerging field of data studies, which seeks to understand the new roles played by data in times of datafication. This is a problem for a number of reasons. First, if we do not understand whether data condition everyday experiences as it is claimed, and our thinking about these matters is not informed by the perspectives of the people upon whose data datafication is built, scholarship about data-in-society will be incomplete. Second, and importantly for this special issue, in the absence of such knowledge, data activism, which seeks to challenge existing data power relations and to mobilise data in order to enhance social justice, will rely upon the judgments of elite technical actors and activists about what would constitute more just data practices. In contrast, I argue that to build a picture of what just data arrangements (that is, the practices of organisations that handle and produce data, the policies that govern these practices, and provisions for the development of skills that people need in order to engage with data) might look like, it is important to take account of what non-expert citizens themselves say would enable them to live better with data, based on their everyday experiences of datafication. Greater understanding of everyday living with data can contribute significantly to the knowledge base on which data activism is built. A third problem, then, is that by not focusing on these issues, the field of data studies is not currently as well aligned to the aims of data activism as it might be. This paper explores how we might address this gap