ABSTRACT
206 207It is now widely accepted that, as data gathering and tracking become increasingly ubiquitous, ‘datafication’ is transforming our social world. The quantification of aspects of life previously experienced in qualitative, non-numeric form, such as health and fitness, transport and mobility, democratic participation, leisure and consumption, and, important for this collection, media and communication practices, is having wide-ranging effects. These include alleged benefits, such as greater efficiencies in service provision, and also widespread harms, such as more surveillance, less privacy, and new forms of inequality and injustice. It is these harms that have been the focus of the emerging field of data studies (sometimes also called critical data studies, precisely because of the focus on harms). For example, surveillance is said to be much more ubiquitous, opaque, and speculative in datafied times, as social media and other kinds of data mining make it possible to surveil aspects of life once private and intimate (Andrejevic & Gates, 2014; Dencik & Cable, 2017) and thus deny people their basic right to privacy, itself a contested issue (Cohen, 2013). Another harm of datafication, it is argued, is that it reproduces old inequalities and creates new ones. One of boyd & Crawford’s much-cited ‘six provocations for big data’ is that ‘limited access to big data creates new digital divides’ (2012, p. 673). Relatedly, and emerging from these debates, the discriminatory consequences of the rise of big data have also been noted. Data mining, analysis, and subsequent discrimination result in certain groups having better access to resources, it has been claimed (Andrejevic, 2013; Taylor & Richter, 2017; see Kennedy (2018) for a longer discussion).
