'Datafied living' - a prospect for communication research

Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Stine Lomborg, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen

People around the world increasingly use digital media to keep track of and manage their personal and their working lives. This is made possible by datafication (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013): users’ online activities leave digital traces that are transformed into data points in databases, kept and repurposed by service providers and other private and public organisations in pursuit of value-creation and economic gain. Over the last decade, self-tracking via apps or wearable devices has become an emblematic case of a general datafication of everyday life (Dow Schüll, 2016). This presentation engages Datafied Living through the theoretical lens of communication research and links communicative practices and experiences of self-tracking to societal infrastructures and politics of datafication. It also sketches an empirical pathway for studying people’s uses of digital self-tracking services and its implications for key societal institutions – from the family to the job market to the Danish welfare state.

The seminar will be held via Zoom. For more information including Zoom link, please contact saga.hansen@sh.se .

This is a higher seminar arranged by the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University.