Attending to everyday experiences of living with data can help us make sense of the digital society, especially in relation to the politics of datafication and data-related inequalities. By focusing on everyday life, structures of datafication can be seen not simply as constitutive of social life, but also to be constituted through everyday practices. With an everyday life lens, we can seek out acts of agency, which there is little scope for in visions of datafication conjured up by concepts like data colonialism and surveillance capitalism. Attending to the everyday directs us to the importance of people’s feelings and values in their experiences with data and often mundane acts of agency.

Social inequalities shape lives and lead to different data experiences, many of which are troubling. People’s everyday lives are not all the same, and already socially unequal populations are more likely to be discriminated against in data-driven systems. The relationship between inequality and datafication, therefore, also requires our attention. In short, ostensibly apolitical, ordinary, everyday engagements with data are as important as more obviously political phenomena, in the broad project of understanding and intervening in data power. The ordinary is political, and a lot is lost if we overlook this.

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield where she directs the Living With Data programme of research. She is interested in how digital developments are experienced by ’ordinary people,’ and how these experiences can inform the work of digital practitioners in ways that overcome inequalities. She researches perceptions of and feelings about ‘datafication,’ the possibility of data-related agency, and whether engaging with data mobilises people to act.

This event took place on Tuesday 16 November 2021 | 7 pm | Auditorium Friedrichstraße – Quartier 110 | Friedrichstraße 180