Data Publics

PUBLIC PLURALITY IN AN ERA OF DATA DETERMINACY

Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms.

By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organisation; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

With contributions by Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Matthew Fuller, Jennifer Gabrys, Benj Gerdes, StephEn Graham, Lev Manovich, Peter Mörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, Louis Moreno, Luciana Parisi, Ravi Sundaram, and Ignacio Valero.

CONTENTS

Introduction (PDF)
Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

SECTION ONE: POLITICS

In Praise of Plasticity
Matthew Fuller

Data Capitalism, Sociogenic Prediction and Recursive Indeterminacies
Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Emotariat Accelerationism and the Republic of Data
Ignacio Valero

SECTION TWO: ENVIRONMENTS

Unearthly Domain: The enigmatic data publics of satellites
Stephen Graham

Sensing Air and Creaturing Data
Jennifer Gabrys

Offsite: Data, materiality, landscape, compression
Benj Gerdes

Fracking Sociality: Architecture, real estate and the internet’s new urbanism
Louis Moreno

SECTION THREE: PLATFORMS

City-making in the Age of Platforms
Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer

The Aesthetic Society
Lev Manovich

Publics or Post-Publics? Contemporary expression after the mobile phone
Ravi Sundaram