Data & Society

Ilana Gershon discusses how we all have moments in which someone’s use of new media baffles us, and we have to ask a friend how to respond. It often isn’t just the content of the message, it is also using that particular medium in that way which leaves us scratching our heads. In this talk, I discuss what anthropological concepts can help us understand our confusion. I will turn to LinkedIn as my case study and analyze the dilemmas people face when using LinkedIn as they look for a job. This will be my starting point to discuss how the newness of new media generates social dilemmas, especially for the people these days who are looking for a job.

Natasha Schüll – From the NSA scandal to Facebook’s controversial “mood experiment,” the past decade has seen heated debate over the ways that governments and corporations collect data on citizens and consumers, the ends to which they use it, and the threat this poses to civil liberties. Yet even as this discussion over surveillant monitoring unfolds, the public has embraced practices and products of self-tracking, applying sensor-laden patches, wristbands, and pendants to their own bodies.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explores how mainstream self-tracking technologies – in their design, marketing, and use – increasingly part ways with the ethos of intensive self-attention found within the Quantified Self (QS) community, serving as digital compasses to guide consumers through the confounding, tempting, and sometimes toxic landscape of everyday choice making and lifestyle management (for instance, by regulating the micro-rhythms of their bites, steps, sips, and breaths). By offering them a way to fulfill the cultural demand for self-management while delegating the often tedious, sometimes existentially taxing labor involved in meeting that demand, such devices at once exemplify and short-circuit ideals of individual agency and responsibility.

In the story of self-tracking technology and its increasing automation, a certain ambivalence over the terms of contemporary selfhood comes to the fore. Are there any connections to be drawn between this ambivalence and broader debates over governmental and corporate surveillance, data privacy, and the possibility for resistance?

danah boyd weaves together her work on youth, privacy, and data-driven technologies, to examine the complicated social and cultural dynamics underpinning social media, the messiness of “big data,” and the problematic implications of using algorithms designed for one problem to address societal issues without accounting for unintended consequences.

Noel Hidalgo will journey through two fellowships — his Data & Society Fellowship and construction of a new fellowship for 21st century civic hackers. The first half of the discussion will focus on detailed lessons learned from working within the City’s civic technology community, collaborating with CUNY’s Service Corps students, building a municipal open data curriculum, and developing partnerships with the Mayor’s Office, Manhattan Borough President, and various City agencies.

Bruce Schneider describes how we’ have created a world where information technology permeates our economies, social interactions, and intimate selves. The combination of mobile, cloud computing, the Internet Things, persistent computing, and autonomy is resulting in something altogether different — a world-sized web. This World-Sized Web promises great benefits, but it is also vulnerable to a host of new threats from users, criminals, corporations, and governments. These threats can now result in physical damage and even death.

In this talk, Schneier will take a retrospective look back at what we’ have learned from past attempts to secure these systems. He will also push us forward to consider seriously what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we will need to secure them in the future.