Today’s bodies are akin to ‘walking sensor platforms’. Bodies either host, or are the subjects of, an array of sensing devices that act to convert bodily movements, actions and dynamics into circulative data. This article proposes the notions of ‘disembodied exhaust’ and ‘embodied exhaustion’ to conceptualise processes of bodily sensorisation and datafication. As the material body interfaces with networked sensor technologies and sensing infrastructures, it emits disembodied exhaust: gaseous flows of personal information that establish a representational data-proxy. It is this (...) networked actant that progressively structures how embodied subjects experience their daily lives. The significance of this symbiont medium in determining the outcome of interplays between networked individuals and audiences necessitates that it is carefully contrived. The article explores the nature and function of the data-proxy, and its impact on social relations. Drawing on examples that depict individuals engaging with their data-proxies, the article suggests that managing a virtual presence is analogous to a work relation, demanding diligence and investment. But it also shows how the data-proxy operates as a mode of affect that challenges conventional distinctions made between organic and inorganic bodies, agency and actancy, mortality and immortality, presence and absence. (shrink)

Critical Data Studies explore the unique cultural, ethical, and critical challenges posed by Big Data. Rather than treat Big Data as only scientifically empirical and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that Big Data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact with society, its organization and functioning, and the resulting impact on individuals’ daily lives. CDS questions the (...) many assumptions about Big Data that permeate contemporary literature on information and society by locating instances where Big Data may be naively taken to denote objective and transparent informational entities. In this introduction to the Big Data & Society CDS special theme, we briefly describe CDS work, its orientations, and principles. (shrink)

Contemporary scientific research and public policy are not in agreement over what should be done to address the dangers that result from the drop in driving performance that occurs as a driver talks on a cellular phone. One response to this threat to traffic safety has been the banning in a number of countries and some states in the USA of handheld cell phone use while driving. However, research shows that the use of hands-free phones (such as headsets and dashboard-mounted (...) speakers) also accompanies a drop, leading some to recommend regulation of both kinds of mobile phones. In what follows, I draw out the accounts of the driving impairment associated with phone use implicit in research and policy and develop an alternative account grounded in philosophical considerations. Building on work in a school of thought called postphenomenology, I review and expand concepts useful for articulating human bodily and perceptual relations to technology. By applying these ideas to the case of driving while talking on the phone, I offer an account of the drop in driving performance which focuses on the embodied relationships users develop with the car and the phone, and I consider implications for research and policy. (shrink)

Electronic information is a vital but complex component in the modern health care system, fueling ongoing efforts to develop a universal electronic health record infrastructure. This innovation creates a substantial tension between two desirable values: the increased quality and utility of patient medical records and the protection of the privacy of the information they contain. This article discusses related U.S. legislation, policy, and law—including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. This article offers an inclusive, equilibrium model to (...) conceptualize the spectrum of challenge that this interplay of desirable but oppositional values creates. The model illustrates the relationship between information privacy and information flow, and that between individual and society-level needs, within the resulting impact sectors of individual security, health care priorities, public health effectiveness, and e-health development, while specifying beneficial outcomes for each. (shrink)

Despite all the attention to Big Data and the claims that it represents a “paradigm shift” in science, we lack understanding about what are the qualities of Big Data that may contribute to this revolutionary impact. In this paper, we look beyond the quantitative aspects of Big Data and examine it from a sociotechnical perspective. We argue that a key factor that distinguishes “Big Data” from “lots of data” lies in changes to the traditional, well-established “control zones” that facilitated clear (...) provenance of scientific data, thereby ensuring data integrity and providing the foundation for credible science. The breakdown of these control zones is a consequence of the manner in which our network technology and culture enable and encourage open, anonymous sharing of information, participation regardless of expertise, and collaboration across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional barriers. We are left with the conundrum—how to reap the benefits of Big Data while re-creating a trust fabric and an accountable chain of responsibility that make credible science possible. (shrink)

This article argues for the right to nonparticipation for Global Digital Citizenship. It recuperates the notion of political nonparticipation in the context of information and communication technologies and GDC in order to show that nonparticipation can operate effectively in non-State spheres, particularly online. The paper begins with a discussion of nonparticipation in the context of Nation States and non-Statal Organizations before offering a brief survey of the terms Global Citizenship, Digital Citizenship, and GDC. Nonparticipation in an online context is then (...) explained, followed by a discussion of practical concerns, such as who might enforce GDC rights among global digital citizens. (shrink)

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

This article attempts to question modes of sharing and watching to rethink political subjectivity beyond that which is enabled and enforced by the current data regime. It identifies and examines a ‘shareveillant’ subjectivity: a form configured by the sharing and watching that subjects have to withstand and enact in the contemporary data assemblage. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how ‘shareveillance’ produces an anti-political role for the public. In describing shareveillance as, after Jacques (...) Rancière, a distribution of the sensible, this article posits a politico-ethical injunction to cut into the share and flow of data in order to arrange a more enabling assemblage of data and its affects. In order to interrupt shareveillance, this article borrows a concept from Édouard Glissant and his concern with raced otherness to imagine what a ‘right to opacity’ might mean in the digital context. To assert this right is not to endorse the individual subject in her sovereignty and solitude, but rather to imagine a collective political subjectivity and relationality according to the important question of what it means to ‘share well’ beyond the veillant expectations of the state. (shrink)