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ABSTRACT
This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in order to highlight the way datalogical systems ideologically and politically shape people’s lives. We argue that NEET is a long-standing data category that does work and has resonance within wider datalogical systems. Secondly, that these systems are decision-making and far from benign. They have real impact on people’s lives – not just in a straightforwardly, but in obscure, complex and uneven ways which makes the potential for disruption or intervention increasingly problematic. Finally, these datalogical systems also implicate and are generated by us, even as we seek to critique them.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Helen Thornham is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. She is involved in a number of research projects investigating practices in digital media that are funded by the EPSRC, ESRC and British Academy and is the author of Ethnographies of the Videogame: Narrative, Gender and Praxis (2011) and co-editor of Renewing Feminisms (2013) and Content Cultures (2014). Her research focuses on gender and technological mediations, digital inequalities, embodiment, youth, space, place and communities. [email: [email protected]].
Edgar Gómez Cruz is a Research Fellow at RMIT, Melbourne. He has published widely on a number of topics relating to digital culture, ethnography and photography. His recent publications include From Kodak Culture to Networked Image. An Ethnography of Digital Photography Practices (2012) and Digital Photography and Everyday Life: Empirical Studies in Material Visual Practices (2016, with Asko Lehmuskallio). Current research investigates screen cultures and creative practice, which is funded through RCUK and Vice Chancellor research grants. [email: [email protected]].
Notes
1 See project website plus links to findings and reports for all case studies.
5 This number was not static as people moved in and out of employment over the 3 years. The minimum number at any one point was 5, and the maximum was 12. Individuals returned to the group frequently over the 3 years, but we had an iterative cycle where new members could join every 3–6 months.
6 http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/young-people-and-neets-1 (accessed 12 December 2016).
7 And we might think about this in relation to metrics of success, or the way accountability is also figured for the organisations who have to measure and input data that pertains to their ‘success’.
8 One of the ways this is popularly understood is in relation to the ‘computer says no’ phenomenon captured, for example, in Little Britain comedy sketches. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJQ3TM-p2QI
9 This is unsurprising given the overlap of the categories of NEET and youth as suggested by Delebarre (Citation2015).
10 See https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/overview and https://www.gov.uk/housing-benefit/what-youll-get (accessed 10 February 2016).
11 See, for example, the 2014 campaign: https://www.gov.uk/dotherightthing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKAPGpuM848 (accessed 15 February 2016).
12 See research reports for broader discussion of these issues.
13 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/eu-egovernment-report-2016-shows-online-public-services-improved-unevenly (accessed 12 December 2016)
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