We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the “natural” conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence. We propose that this process is best understood through the history of colonialism. Thus, data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit. Data colonialism paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.

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This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling's potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. The concept of mediatization (developed for example by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz), it is argued, is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, the concept of mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the openended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.

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