Our media experiences are increasingly personalised and datafication as a value system is affecting more and more parts of the media system. But as citizens we are agentic, and we need to start talking about how citizens and policy makers can cultivate and shape a different digital infrastructure.
Imagine you are checking the news on the bus on your favourite news site. Or on Facebook for that matter. Suddenly all the news is about sport. You look over your neighbour’s shoulder and the site they are reading is full of stories on the war in Ukraine. We all know the feeling of ‘being seen’, the experience of being overwhelmed with ads for washing machines because of a search we have done. And we recognise that we are sometimes misunderstood, being offered content of no relevance, because of a wrong click on a link or because our friend is desperately seeking tickets to Paris.
Everyday millions of data points flow from all our devices, apps and services into platforms and companies who use this data to send ever more content back to us as citizens.
Increasing amounts of data have resulted in what researchers describe as the datafication of society, leading to everything from filter bubbles and echo chambers to new forms of capitalism surveying citizens every second, even when we sleep or exercise.
What does this mean for our ability to act as citizens in a democratic society?
The DataPublics project has, over the last three years, been investigating how data transform how people form collectives and the role of media in that process. We have done ethnographies among anti-COVID-19 protestors and across the digital landscape of Facebook groups, we have been inside the machine rooms of media organisations, mapping their tech stacks and data flows, and we have asked people in surveys and in interviews about how they perform acts of citizenship across the hybrid media landscape.
We did so against the backdrop of what we have termed ‘the algorithmic drama’. In the stories of big tech platforms, citizens are often seen as defenceless victims. The platforms are portrayed as the evil king controlling them and the democracies they inhabit. They lead us into dark corners of the internet and show content that is harmful, while not restricting the negative tone or removing toxic content.
The narratives of big tech as ‘evil’ data kings on the one hand, and legacy media with long histories in print and on television as ‘saints’ of democracy are powerful in today’s debates, and they control many of the policies and discourses around how we perceive the role of the media in today’s datafied democracies.
But the story is much more complex than that.
Firstly, Facebook groups, for example, engage thousands of citizens in conversations about everyday political issues such as gender equality and animal rights. These groups, we found, function as a training ground for learning how to become good citizens. The platforms are providing spaces for publics to emerge and form, which, to some extent, have disappeared both in public spaces and in traditional media.
Secondly, one person’s cause can suddenly become a hot potato and ‘the talk of town’, like we saw with the #MeToo movement. This is enabled by algorithms and digital sorting mechanisms, which are signs on the post linked to metadata (for example hashtags), gathering thousands of posts together and linking offline and online spaces. This means that participants and activists at an offline physical demonstration can amplify their visibility in different spaces beyond legacy media. People can make themselves heard, even when what they say is not liked by the elite majority, as we saw in demonstrations against masks and vaccinations in many cities in Europe.
Thirdly, legacy journalistic news media are increasingly behaving like tech platforms. They too are collecting data on their audiences, cultivating publics by increasingly personalising their front pages so they fit the exact interests of the individual user via recommender systems. They sort the content into different data categories and they sort users, linking content and users with the help of algorithms and machine learning. But they also need to balance public and commercial interests, which makes them differ from social media platforms. They often insist on the importance of a healthy information diet: they don’t just want to give them burgers and chips, but also salad and vegetables. But they struggle when data and metrics show that users are not as oriented towards the healthy democratic news content as they wish them to be. In their efforts to make algorithms to secure these balances and diversity in news, they are dependent on ever more data. This data streams through information infrastructures: like motorways and electricity pipes these infrastructures are essential for the flow of information between citizens, media and platforms. Legacy media are deeply ingrained and built into these infrastructures, despite their narrative of being a counter-measure to the big tech industry.
This datafied formation of publics and our agency as citizens are shaped by the way that big tech structures the internet, how it leads information in some directions, giving visibility to some, while ruling others out. It is shaped by our ability as citizens to build bridges between islands of personal interests and by how we gather in collective publics beyond our own personal interests.
Jannie Møller Hartley is associate professor Roskilde University and PI of the Velux Funded DATAPUBLICS-project.
DataPublics edited by Jannie Møller Hartley, Jannick Kirk Sørensen and David Mathieu is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £85.00.
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