ABSTRACT
Digitisation includes technical systems that communicate with each other but can only communicate the characters for which input and output interfaces are available. That is a fraction of what human communication is all about. The resulting lack of contact bothers us and we find it inadequate. In times of Covid-19 we have learned that the longer the phases of exclusively digitally executed workflows and processes last, the more we realise that we lack activities that do not require digital technology, as it was a matter of course before Corona. This leads us to ask what it means when we become avatars or robots of ourselves. The following demonstrations of an exclusively digitally organised summer festival and a fully digitised library can give us insights into the purely digital perspective.
ABSTRACT
The use of digital platforms by the university communities to produce knowledge, research, teaching, and management has not only intensified but it has also diversified since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a context where higher education and the use of digital technologies are increasingly intertwined, universities can take advantage of this unplanned hiper-digitalization event to explore fundamental questions about learning and researching in a post-digital landscape. This article is the result of an exploratory study based on a co-design and virtual ethnography, analyzing the attributes and foci of 31 "data research center" in universities from 16 countries. Although the centers analyzed have different profiles and approaches, they all investigate the intensive use of data and its political-social implications, with a special interest in the fair and ethical use of data for administrative, research, and pedagogical activities. As result, this work provides 20 proposals, grouped into 4 dimensions of possible institutional areas of development for universities. These proposals aim to contribute to the critical analysis of how higher education institutions can play a central role to face the growing relevance of advanced data systems in our societies. © 2023 Grupo de Investigacion FORCE. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Digitisation includes technical systems that communicate with each other but can only communicate the characters for which input and output interfaces are available. That is a fraction of what human communication is all about. The resulting lack of contact bothers us and we find it inadequate. In times of Covid-19 we have learned that the longer the phases of exclusively digitally executed workflows and processes last, the more we realise that we lack activities that do not require digital technology, as it was a matter of course before Corona. This leads us to ask what it means when we become avatars or robots of ourselves. The following demonstrations of an exclusively digitally organised summer festival and a fully digitised library can give us insights into the purely digital perspective. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] Zusammenfassung: Die Digitalisierung umfasst technische Systeme, die zwar miteinander kommunizieren, aber nur die Zeichen kommunizieren können, für die Ein- und Ausgabeschnittstellen vorhanden sind. Das ist ein Bruchteil dessen, was menschliche Kommunikation ausmacht. Die daraus resultierende Kontaktlosigkeit stört uns und wir empfinden sie als mangelhaft. In Zeiten von Covid-19 haben wir gelernt, je länger die Phasen ausschließlich digital ausgeführter Arbeitsabläufe und Prozesse andauern, desto mehr erkennen wir, dass uns Tätigkeiten fehlen, die keine digitale Technik benötigen, wie es vor Corona selbstverständlich war. Das führt uns zu der Frage, was es bedeutet, wenn wir zu Avataren oder Robotern unserer selbst werden. Die folgenden Demonstrationen eines ausschließlich digital organisierten Sommerfestes und einer vollständig digitalisierten Bibliothek können uns einige Einblicke in die Perspektive des rein Digitalen geben. (German) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis is the property of De Gruyter 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 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 . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good' life and human flourishing. The main aim is to highlight the deep-seated changes of the welfare state that emerge with the delegation of care and control tasks to algorithmic systems and the automation based on datafication practices. Welfare provision is undergoing major shifts that imply fundamentally rethinking the role of technology that supports and enhances welfare with the help of data. © The Author(s) 2023.
ABSTRACT
This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens' everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship' regimes worldwide.
ABSTRACT
The article deals with teachers and teacher education from the perspective of broad policy frames, of how these frames are enacted in specific policies, including teacher career systems as well as pre-service and continuing teacher education, and how they appear in a diversity of international contexts. New Public Management and Accountability teacher policies are critically discussed in the light of their contemporary prevalence, using recent relevant research. Social justice and inclusion as a broad policy frame is examined in the light of immediate challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant people, as well as by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 health crisis has been heavily reported on an international scale for several years. This has pushed news journalism in a datafied direction: reporters have learnt how to analyse and visualise the statistical effects of COVID-19 on various sectors of society. As a result, in 2021, the international Sigma Awards competition for data journalism highlighted coverage of the pandemic. Using content analysis with qualitative elements, this paper analyses the shortlisted works covering COVID-19 from the competition (n=73). It focuses on the data references made by the teams - sources, type of both reference and data used - showing statistics from official institutions to be the most used type of data. It also lists the main problems journalists had to face while working on their projects. Most often these problems fell into two categories: specific characteristics of the project, mostly 'time consuming', and issues with data. © 2022 Polish Communication Association. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic provoked greater digitalisation of personal data and deepened the ongoing process of algorithmic governance. In order to reopen to tourism and balance the spread of the virus while keeping travellers and locals safe, countries established various rules for border crossing, such as digital passenger locator forms (PLFs), while some countries, such as Greece, implemented an algorithm (EVA) to analyse these PLFs. This transfer of data raises important questions about personal data privacy rights and informed consent. This study explored the perceptions of travellers towards these new rules, the sharing of additional personal data, and their imaginaries of the possible algorithmic work behind it. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ethnic Estonian and Russian-speaking Estonian graduates in Estonia (n=14) regarding their insights on (1) the perceived norms of sharing personal data and the use of the data by governmental authorities while travelling and (2) the perceptions of datafied/algorithmically controlled travel during the pandemic, with additional insight on the differences between the two groups. The interviewees weren't against the PLFs or algorithmic processing in principle, but where they saw poor implementation or design, or where they felt that things had been done in semi-secrecy. According to the interviewees, datafication and algorithmic governance require deeper consideration of transparency, clarity, and communication to achieve truly informed consent and resolve unease with the creeping influence of algorithms. © 2022 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
ABSTRACT
Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the "Metaverse". This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users' cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help individuals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.
ABSTRACT
This special theme brings together reflections and deliberations regarding the design, implementation, and development of data governance. By addressing “social data governance” as the keyword of the special theme, we aim to further the discussion on a contextual understanding of both the governing foundations and effects of data, dataism, and datafication in different societies. Such a discussion reminds us to pay particular attention to—and thus account for—the social dynamics that underpin and contextualize the design, operation, and promotion of quantified governing mechanisms in which information on social behaviors is collected, datafied, manipulated, and represented. Essentially, the social dynamics of data governance have existed for a long time and in many forms, ranging from credit bureaus’ scrutiny, evaluation, and labeling of their customers to internet-enabled massive data collection and scoring systems used by governments, and to automated contact tracing techniques as a centerpiece of dataveillance and infection control amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, scholarly work from a wide range of disciplines like law, mathematics, and business and with diverse geographical foci has not yet been comparatively and reflectively articulated. Being rich and diverse, the special theme advances such a requisite understanding of the status and relevance of social dynamics of data governance mechanisms based on a wide range of empirical cases around the globe. To scrutinize the social dynamics helps illuminate and contrast divergent manifestations of data governance and their underlying mechanisms. © The Author(s) 2022.
ABSTRACT
This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide. [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
The emerging phenomenon of platformization has given rise to what has been termed "platform society," a digitally connected world where platforms have penetrated the heart of urban societies-transforming social practices, disrupting social interactions and market relations, and affecting democratic processes. One of the recent manifestations of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform whose data infrastructures, governance models, and economic processes are predicted to penetrate different urban sectors and spheres of urban life. The Metaverse is an idea of a hypothetical set of "parallel virtual worlds" that incarnate ways of living in believably virtual cities as an alternative to future data-driven smart cities. However, this idea has already raised concerns over what constitutes the global architecture of computer mediation underlying the Metaverse with regard to different forms of social life as well as social order. This study analyzes the core emerging trends enabling and driving data-driven smart cities and uses the outcome to devise a novel framework for the digital and computing processes underlying the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities. Further, it examines and discusses the risks and impacts of the Metaverse, paying particular attention to: platformization; the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing non-spontaneous "normality" of social order; corporate-led technocratic governance; governmentality; privacy, security, and trust; and data governance. A thematic analysis approach is adopted to cope with the vast body of literature of various disciplinarities. The analysis identifies five digital and computing processes related to data-driven smart cities: digital instrumentation, digital hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization. The novelty of the framework derived based on thematic analysis lies in its essential processual digital and computing components and the way in which these are structured and integrated given their clear synergies as to enabling the functioning of the Metaverse towards potentially virtual cities. This study highlights how and why the identified digital and computing processes-as intricately interwoven with the entirety of urban ways of living-arouse contentions and controversies pertaining to society' public values. As such, it provides new insights into understanding the complex interplay between the Metaverse as a form of science and technology and the other dimensions of society. Accordingly, it contributes to the scholarly debates in the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) by highlighting the societal and ethical implications of the platformization of urban societies through the Metaverse.
ABSTRACT
The article deals with teachers and teacher education from the perspective of broad policy frames, of how these frames are enacted in specific policies, including teacher career systems as well as pre-service and continuing teacher education, and how they appear in a diversity of international contexts. New Public Management and Accountability teacher policies are critically discussed in the light of their contemporary prevalence, using recent relevant research. Social justice and inclusion as a broad policy frame is examined in the light of immediate challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant people, as well as by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
ABSTRACT
This essay draws from a pragmatic feminist approach. It outlines the importance of relational ethics and Deweyan democracy to educational practices using the exploitative situation of emergency remote learning and women teachers to show the impact of systems that were in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, but which have become more concerning within those parameters. Such systems include the educational technology industry and the datafication of education. These systems rest in neoliberalism and concern their means and ends with economic gain instead of the importance of human relations. The essay suggests that centering relational ethics and relying on educational democracy can create hope and healing for people within these educational spaces and systems. © 2022, Purdue University Press. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The article explores the digital everyday life of recently or currently undocumented migrants in times of Covid-19 in Finland. It is based on an empirical case study on a collaborative photographic exhibition and workshop including visual images, diaries, interviews, and discussions. The analysis explores the ways in which a photography exhibition and a workshop may depict meaningful moments in digital everyday life as well as open up an understanding of the various vulnerabilities that emerge in the life of the undocumented, as expressed by themselves. The study demonstrates the fundamental importance of communication rights for people in precarious life situations, expressed by themselves in visual images. The insight produced multidimensionally in images, discussions, and interviews illustrate how digital media environment exposes to coerced visibility and requires constant struggle for communicative rights. These struggles take place on the material infrastructural level of devices, chargers, and access, but also on the level of self-expression and connection on social media platforms. Finally, the article discusses the emancipatory potential of a collaborative exhibition and workshop as a way to encounter and deal with increasingly vulnerable life situations. It points out the relevance of collaborative work as a research method, in providing knowledge from experience as well as space of recognition.
ABSTRACT
This provocation shows how five emerging digital citizenship regimes are rescaling European nation-states through a taxonomy: (i) the globalised/generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four digital citizenship regimes in six city-regions;(ii) algorithmic citizenship (Tallinn);(iii) liquid citizenship (Barcelona/Amsterdam);(iv) metropolitan citizenship (Cardiff);and (v) stateless citizenship (Barcelona/Glasgow/Bilbao). I argue that this phenomenon should matter to us insofar as these emerging digital citizenship regimes have resulted in nation-state space rescaling, challenging its heretofore privileged position as the only natural platform for the monopoly of technopolitical and sensory power.
ABSTRACT
Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.
ABSTRACT
This essay provides a critical observation of the South Korean government's distinctive management of COVID-19 with particular reference to the state of emergency. It reveals that the success of South Korea's handling of the pandemic is largely attributed by a majority of Western media to the efficient deployment of both information and communication technologies and Confucian collectivism, two components that seem contradictory yet not incompatible under the rubric of techno-Orientalism. Analyzing the intensification of surveillance and the rapid datafication of society, this essay argues that the current state of emergency is not a breakdown of normality but a continuation of the state of crisis and disaster that rules a developing country like South Korea. In doing so, the essay seeks to facilitate a critical discussion about a new mode of democracy in the era of pandemic that increasingly grapples with tensions between individual freedom and public health.