Digital Rights and Internet Freedom in the Big Data Era – Is It a Lost Battle?

The Internet is entwined in our everyday activities involving the navigation and creation of large amounts of information and communication data. It transforms social action that once tended to be invisible into online quantified data that allows concurrent tracking analysis and optimisation. This has given rise to concerns that we are led into an emerging order of what Couldry and Mejias (2019) term ‘data colonialism,’ which appropriates human life and turns many aspects of users’ social life into algorithmic relations. Critical accounts of algorithmic power reflect on how 'top-down' datafication typically corresponds to a loss of human agency. In this regular paper session, we welcome theoretical and empirical submissions that investigate how people are unequally affected by the harms of datafication and surveillance, how they seek to make sense of technological change and respond to the hidden injustices, do users oppose to dominant forces of organizations and states to protect digital rights and Internet freedom? Whether and how datafication and surveillance affect social inequality? What alternative values, methods, and strategies emerge from the people and communities that point toward other ways of being part of the datafied society? Are there data-activists that oppose algorithms affordances to protect vulnerable populations with low digital literacies?

Couldry, N., and Mejias, U.A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.