Towards Informatic Personhood: understanding contemporary subjects in a data-driven society

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationships of subjects in the context of data and data technologies, and advances an original theoretical framework called Informatic Personhood to better conceptual subjects and their relationships. Because of the enormous structural change that data has contributed to, subjects are sometimes distant and backgrounded in studies of data, despite data having significant impacts on their lives. Data-mediated relationships mean an increased scale to a relationship, with individuals able to connect to much broader contexts of data, but also have these structures reach down to their subjective context through data. Informatic Personhood seeks to capture the dynamics of data present in everyday life, addressing this distance and better conceptualising the scale of data-mediated relationships. This framework has two parts. The first – The Informatic Context – explores salient structural developments around data and conceptualises this as being defined by the presence of ‘data interfaces’ (that connect individuals to digital contexts), ‘data circulation’ (trends in the movement and storage of data), and ‘data abstraction’ (data manipulation practices). The second part concerns the Informatic Person, and the embodied, affective, and sensemaking relationships of individuals occurring across and through the Informatic Context. This framework better addresses the scale of data-mediated relationships, and places subjects firmly in the foreground of how data is understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Data
• sociology
• subjectivity
• informatics
• Big Data
• algorithms

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Paul Box, Simon Cox, Ben Leighton and the other members of EIG for their support in my role as Social Architect and in publishing this. Deepest thanks to Gavin Smith for his advice on the first draft of this paper, and to Adrian Mackenzie on his advice on publishing it. As always, to Peta Cook for her patience and incredible doctoral tutelage. Finally, thanks to the reviewers of this piece for their advice on improving it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Ashlin Lee is a Social Architect and Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in the Environmental Informatics Group of Land and Water Branch. He is also an honorary lecturer in Sociology, in the School of Sociology, at the Australian National University [email: [email protected], [email protected]].

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article