This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard-a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information-from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the building of the dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.
Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in the home for quarantine, work and study, enabled by the pandemic, is rescripting privacy. The acceleration of technology adoption and surveillance in the home has implications for privacy and potential discrimination, and should be approached with a critical lens.
Some of the largest tech companies in the world, not to mention a stream of smaller startups, are now our roommates. Homes have become the target for smart devices and digital platforms that aim to upgrade old appliances, like refrigerators, and provide new capabilities, like virtual assistants. While smart devices have been variously championed and demonized in both academic literature and popular media, this article moves critical analysis beyond the common—but still important—concerns with privacy and security. By directing our attention to the wider political economy of datafication, it reveals the increasingly influential, yet shadowy, role of industries outside the tech sector in designing and deploying surveillance systems in domestic spaces. Namely, the FIRE sector of finance, insurance, and real estate. When Amazon and Google moved into our homes, they also let in a suite of uninvited third parties.
Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have superseded disciplinary modes of control. This is said to involve the fragmentation of individuals into discrete units of dividual data. We argue that the shift from disciplinary to modulatory control should not be overstated. Rather, disciplinary and modulatory modes of control work together across a spectrum of personhood, from individual to dividual. Understanding the co-existence of, and the relationships between, these two forms of social control is essential for thinking through the urban politics of data and control. Our article illustrates this contention with three vignettes of how the dividualised data associated with discrete digital infrastructures and systems are also being ‘re-assembled’ by various authorities seeking to discipline the behaviour of individuals. It concludes with a discussion of such powers of re-assembly and their critical importance to the politics of control in digitally networked cities.
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