This blog is born out of a critical PhD research that I am in the process of finishing that took the best of the past few years of my life. A lot happened in the digital world of what has come to be known simply as “social” during that time.
UPDATE: The PhD was completed in June 2023. It it titled “DATAFIED. A Critical Exploration of the Production of Knowledge in the Digital Age”.
This research started off because in the early 2010s I felt that something momentous was happening that we could not see yet but that had the potential to upend the world as we knew it. I also felt somewhat disturbed by the general hyper optimism about digital technologies and I wanted to sort out the hype from reality.
Every civilization is carried by a dream, an ideology. The research is a critical look at the digital age, and the dream that is shaping the emergent civilization of the 21st century. That dream I call DATAFICATION. I argue that datafication is the Phantasmagoria of the 21st Century.
What’s Datafication? It has been defined as “the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data” Jose Van Dijck, Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance, 2014. Another way to describe it is: turning human experience into computer-ready data.
What is phantasmagoria? It is a dream, a fantasy.
As I said, every age has an underlying ideology that supports it, an idea that the age holds true and that shapes it. For cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the phantasmagoria of the 19th and 20th century was mass consumerism. It was the dream, the fantasy that shaped that age. Of course, that ideology, that big dream is a phantasmagoria, it’s not real, because it changes with every change of age. So here I am looking at datafication as the fantasy that shapes the civilisation of the 21st century.
CAVEATS
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” – Paul Virilio “Politics of the Very Worst” 1999
First, this is a critical research, which means that I am critiquing. There are many benefits to social digital technology but everybody knows what they are. I am interested by the shipwreck, not by how magnificent the ship is. So, if while you read this blog, you feel I am a wet blanket, or it is all doom and gloom, it is by design!
Second, this is a blog, not the thesis. It presents bits and pieces. I try to present information in a way that makes sense, but as Marshall McLuhan said, The Medium is The Message, and a blog does not lend itself to long logical arguments.
Third, my purpose here is to raise awareness about the big picture situation, the ecology, not to present systemic solutions, although if there are questions, I can share some of the strategies that I have developed as a user. And if YOU have developed individual strategies, please share them here as well!
Contact me at LiveWithData@pm.me.