ABSTRACT
Byoung-gyu: From my perspective, the relationship between data and neoliberalism has been under scrutiny, especially by some critical thinkers for some time now. The proliferation of research on neoliberalism and the rise of BIG data have incurred different terminology usages, which at least partially speak to the problematic role of data in neoliberalism. For example, scholars talk about informational neoliberalism (Neubauer, 2011), datafication (Chandler, 2015), dataphilia (Lambert et al., 2015), the society of metadata (Pasquinelli, 2015), the information society, and the data economy, among other things. Do we need various forms of expression, the power of lyric and poems, to move towards ‘data’ freedom? Could data function as a free entity that can be recognized as a form of relationality and as a force to resist governmentality?
Mirka: I wonder how qualitative researchers could work against dataphilia. How might small form, mundane, and minor data be important and transformative?
Anna: Wow. I just want to read the title over and over. The less and little is so much more. But shall you all go further and leave me behind, then please prepare for a bit of the potentialities and possibilities of data that might work to push beyond neoliberal data discourse. Smig!
Marek: I am intrigued by notions of resistance to BIG data. It does not have to be BIG resistance. Just a little one, with our daily encounters with all subjects and objects, is fine with me. I would like to see how data become subjects and subjects become data, to treat them with similar ethics and respect that they want to give to the individual subject under the neoliberal ideology.
