# Glossary for a Digital Age

#### About this seminar:
In this short seminar the class with split into small working groups. Each group will choose a topic, concept or theory from the last eight weeks of the module. Or something new if you're feeling bold. The group will add a short description of the idea below, adding links, images, gifs and critique. The format was inspired by a glossary created by Mollie Bartholomew.
**Hints**: Keep it short and snappy - less than 120 words. Keep groups to four members or less.
***Reflection***: this is an experimental exercise. It might not work. Then again, it might. Note how your are socialising to this new platform? Are there social or material constraints? What norms and behaviour are working for you? What isn't? How are these established? Who gets to decide?
Find peers in the class who can help you with the **Markdown** text format if needs be. [Here's a guide to get you started](https://itsfoss.com/markdown-guide/).

# Who is here
say hi by adding your name, and an emoji
- Cian 🦜
- z
- Yiran 🦑
- Hannah🔗
- Amanda 🥨
- Fu 💤
- Jack 🥸
- G. 🩰
- Evie
- Capri 🫡
- Jodi 🕷️
- Kate 🧠
- Robin
- Grace
- Morgan 🐧
- Kit 💫
- Sascha
- laura😼 -
- Amy🧚🏼‍♀️
- Steph 😈
- Yinan 🤤
- Nyhare 💡
- tamanna 🫶🏼
- alysia🪷
- Zixuan🐣
- Ge
- Milena
- Junjie😎
- Zak 🐛
- Jiawen🥱
- Chenyi🐷
- Guo🍏
- Siwei🏰
- Christian🎮
-
# Ideas, concepts, theories, cases
## Idea 1: Practices
### Authors: Cian, Yiran
Practices are the repeated doings that make up human life and human culture... practice makes perfect...
The actual maneuver of (digital) tools for ends (e.g., teaching, caring, etc.)

## Idea 2: Agency
### Authors: Mollie
Agency – a sense of control in life, a capacity to influence (your own) thoughts and behaviour, and faith in your own ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. Helps yourself to be stable, whilst flexible in a time of change/conflict.

## Idea 3: Discourse
### Authors: Mollie
Refers to systems of meanings in which images are embedded and make sense – a framework of meaning making. A particular knowledge about the world that shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it.

## Idea 4: Governance
### Authors: Mollie
"audit and accountability [...] calculations that attempt to mitigate against risky behaviour and maximise health benefits to individuals [...] avoiding habitual 'bad behaviours' or 'lifestyle choices' which contribute to chronic illness" (ibid.). Failures in health and education become failures of individual choice and responsibility. Transactional - healthcare becomes about service users (Glynos 2014)

## Idea 5: Control
### Authors: Cian and Yiran
ah, what did Cian say earlier about control... something about hierarchies

## Idea 6: Careund
### Authors: G. 🩰 Junjie, Tamanna
Care is everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible.
Horizontal Relationships over Hierarchies
Care/control implications: 1. DIgital pracitices involve mundane + invisible work. 2. highly gendered and gendering. 3. Hidden capacities are a burden to women, 4. Other intersectional subjectivities at play too.
Care is an obligation – sometimes present, sometimes not in infrastructures.

## Idea 7: Commercialisation
### Authors: Evie, Morgan
Internet, capitalism
"there is a commercialisation aspect... a transition of research results into a broadly deployed and available information infrastructure... [the] commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive, private network services, but also the devlopment of commercial products implementing the Internet technology (Leiner et al. 2009, week 2).

In other words: scholars have identified the integration of the market and the internet as a defining moment during the development of the internet.

## Idea 8: Technological determinism
### Authors: Jodi, Capri, Amanda
Technological determinism is about the inevitability of technological progress, which will determine the trajectory of the future. However, this attitude grants immense power to tech companies and leaders, who can stymy resistance to their projects with the narrative that resistance is futile in the first place. It also removes a sense of personal accountability on the part of the consumer, who believes they have no agency in their adoption and are mere bystanders amid the inevitability of tech. Examples of this include Elon Musk's multiple ventures inspired by sci-fi (Neuralink, Mars missions, self-driving exploding cars), which garner public legitimacy via a belief that tech will lead the way.

## Idea 9: Digital cage 🪤
### Authors: Grace, Stephanie, Lukasz, Laura
***foundation***
- Conceptualizing the digital through foundational social theory

| Max Weber | Michel Foucault |
| -------- | -------- |
| "Iron Cage" | panopticon and self-surveillance |
- Constantly aware of being surveilled, social expectations
- Zuboff's surveillance capitalism

***"cage"***
- How the infrastructure of the platforms (algorithms and affordances) exercise control and holds power over the user's agency
- with this awareness, users start to feel "trapped" with internalized, external, and percieved surveillance

***Capitalism***
- Continues Weber's argument that the Iron cage accelerates capitalism through empowering firms who control the infrastructure, that in turn controls the indvidual

## Idea 10: Future Essentialism
### Authors: Milena, Ge
- producing an inevitable future through dominant narrative - e.g. belief that certain technologies will inevitably lead to a specific type of society - dominant narratives draw attention away away from alternative approaches to technology and society + possible futures are closed down
-“The discourses, narratives or visions that, through different means and practices – from historical analyses to speculative estimates to hard statistics and calculation – produce and promote an imaginary of a fixed and scripted, indeed inevitable, future"(Schiølin, 2019, p. 4) in (Smith and Fressoli, 2021) reading
-the view that science and technology contain an intrinsic essence, indifferent to contingencies and independent of the social world, counts as the hallmark of the constructivist turn in STS
-Urge us to thinking about the possibilities of reconsidering the relation and mutiple narratives in the digital age

## Idea 11: Automation (OODA)
### Authors: Fu💤&Christian🎮
the automation can be seen as the exchange of data, which related data will be traded between different servers. for example, if the data, specifically when it related to social media platforms, which the data will be presented as video played/liked numbers, the system will censor your recordings on your preference, and if you shows similar preference, presented by the increasing numbers, then the platform will recommend more related videos. exchange here will be the data from the users-- video watch data/liked video data, and companies servers--controlled pack of data of related videos, which makes them convenient to recommend it to you.

core question:
how can the users of the system start to get control on this exchange process-- if the exschange system are mainly domestic.
is there any possibilities/examples on post-automation/non-automation guided data exchange process?

## Idea 12: Performativity
### Authors: Hannah, Kate, Jack, Zak
Data is a world-making actor, not just descriptive but also shaping activities and decisions. Data is not a passive, pre-existing thing - it is always created. How does the manufacture of data shape the world in which we live? How does it create and maintain power dynamics? What do we include or exclude in the data we collect and what impacts does that have?

The ways that data not just represents but articulates social life...

"to consider how data infrastructures may be involved in not just the representation but also the articulation of collective life, while at the same time being the products of social and institutional work themselves."(Gray 2018)

"what they do and could do differently, and how they are done and could be done differently." (Gray 2018)

*This graph provides an example of the performativity of data: decisions are made about what to count as a Covid-19 death, and what not to count. This is not a self-evident choice. In turn, the choice to represent the data in this way has real, material consequences for the social and political ordering of the world - for instance, when to go into lockdown, or when to lift social distancing restrictions, which in turn impacts directly on who lives and who dies.*

## Idea 13: Imbrication
### Authors: Robin, Kit

"A data infrastructure, like a good stone wall, is an uneven imbrication: an overlapping assemblage of uncemented solutions" - Singh

"Study the imbrication - situates data infrastructures as extensions of existing practices and unpacks relationships that hold them together at specific times and places
" - Singh

Not necessarily confined to data infrastructure, but goes beyond, including things such as 'standards, quantifications, models' ... 'work' ... 'discourses'

Counter to the idea of infrastructure as static, unchanging 'layers of stacks'- instead implies that they change across time and space.

## Idea 14: (Digitial) Platform Economy
### Authors:Sascha, Jiaxuan
The platform economy is "a new and consequential branch of global capitalism"(Vallas and Schor 2020). It is redefining the way in which we, as a society, understand what it means to 'work.'In a more concrete sense, the digital platform economy is a network of digital systems that enbable transactions, sharing, collaboration, etc.between users and the entity (company, government, etc.) in which the platform is housed.

For the digital platform, the work may be a low barrier to entry, but the platform centralising the power, and transforming the employment relationship, the gig workers in a digital platform may be under the control of the platform and platform algorithm, and there is limited autonomy trade for evaluation

## Idea 15: Big Mother
### Authors: G. 🩰 Junjie, Tamanna
A system that under the guise of maternal care seeks to manage, monitor and marketise domestic spaces and practices (Sadowski, Strengers & Kennedy, 2021)
-More work for women: societal shaping: expectations about domestic cleanliness and order have increased over time, thereby adding new tasks to women's domestic workload.

## Idea 16: Care home
### Authors: Yinan, Zixuan, Chenyi
-Care is everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible (Joan Tronto, philosopher of care).
Care is a relationship that depends on human connection – not a service (slides week5 page 28).

## Idea 17: Numero-politics
### Authors: Milena, Ge
- numbers are not neutral facts, they are shaped by politics and shape politics in return
- "Martin and Lynch coined the word ‘numero-politics’ to highlight the political not only in the choice of methods for counting but also the consequences of counting practices on things/people that are counted." (Singh, 2020)
-

## Idea 18: Technosolutionism
### Author: Mollie
A discourse that produces artefacts/statements that contribute in producing a coherent definition of the world – promotes a specific world view. Assumes that every problem can be fixed with technology