Full Description
Data increasingly forms the backbone of systems and processes that shape how we do things and how we relate to each other. Datafication - the uptake of data to reorganize social processes - is reshaping everything from loyalty programs and digital identification systems to credit card payments and rental pricing platforms. Artificial intelligence accelerates these processes.
Making sense of what these changes mean for our everyday lives is no easy task. Datafied systems are highly technical and designed to be convenient and seamless; we tend to encounter them in brief moments of individualized transaction, which makes them difficult to see, let alone read, and their illegibility makes them very challenging to respond to. Communing Data Literacy offers a novel set of concepts and tools to help people make sense of how technology is altering their communities and their social interactions. Building on three years of design research by digital rights organizations in Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the volume analyzes people's everyday experiences with datafication, rethinking data from the perspective of community and offering practical techniques for community engagement.
Communing Data Literacy pushes back against the individualism and techno-centrism of Western data literacy practice and scholarship, providing English readers the opportunity to engage with Latin American perspectives.
Contents
CONTENTS
Table, Exercises, and Examples vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Data Organizes Our Social Relations 3
SECTION ONE
Design Research about Personal Data Literacy
Taking a Design Research Approach 19
Personal Data, Values, and Youth: Pharmaceutical Loyalty Programs in Paraguay 25
Acquiring Contraceptives at Pharmacies: Corporeal Autonomy and Personal Data in Peru 33
Migration, Personal Data, and Financial Services in Chile: Between Vulnerability and Urgency 43
Use of Personal Data by Private Health Care Providers in Uruguay from the Perspective of the Elderly 51
"Do We Deliver with Love?": Data from the Perspective of Colombian Gig Workers 66
What We Learned from Critical Design Research 75
SECTION TWO
Data Literacy Concepts to Inform Practice
The Utility of Concepts 81
Communities of Convenience 85
Unhomed Data Subjects 92
Everyday Invisibility 99
Legibility 105
Communing Literacy 111
SECTION THREE
Techniques to Commune Data Literacy
How to Use the Techniques 119
1 What's in a Name? 122
2 What Data Doesn't Know About Us 127
3 Rights and Responsibilities 132
4 The Value of Sharing 137
5 Imagining Data Journeys 143
6 Epistemic and Hermeneutic Justice 147
7 Citizen Celebrities 153
8 Value versus Values 158
9 Overflow 164
Conclusions: Decentring Western Universalism in Critical Data Literacy 169
References 191
Authors and Contributors 213
Index 217
