Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency

Abstract

New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves.

Big Data-Driven Health Surveillance

“…There is an urgent need to facilitate civic insights and possibilities for formative moral discourse regarding emerging, big data-driven research approaches. This observation also corresponds with what Kennedy and Moss (2015) conceptualise as a much-needed transition towards approaching data subjects as 'knowing' rather than merely 'known publics' . The authors criticise current data practices for addressing publics mainly as passive data subjects, as they are primarily aimed at making sense of datafied individuals (see also Zwitter 2014).…”

Trust in Data Science

“…Data science tools and techniques constitute an increasingly common and complex feature of contemporary work settings, impacting modes of knowledge and governance [27,66,67], shaping organizational practices [15,52,99], reconfiguring publics [20,50,56], and simultaneously enabling and constraining the possibilities of human action and agency [9,10,74]. 1 But the limits and tensions of data science work in its collaborative dimensions are not yet fully scoped.…”

User Data as Public Resource: Implications for Social Media Regulation

“…In the end, this proposal contributes to calls for establishing “a more positive relationship between social media data mining and public life” (Kennedy & Moss, , p. 2), through a conceptualization of user data that makes explicit and concrete the nature of its character as a public resource, which, in turn justifies the application of affirmative public interest obligations that could impose upon the First Amendment rights of social media platform owners. What these public interest obligations look like would, of course, be the important next step.…”