Every data set has a setting — workshop for Uroboros Festival
Notes from a workshop I ran as part of the Uroboros 2021 Festival, organised by the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. In the session, we used situated data analysis as a way of showing how data shapes our physical and social environments. Then we hand wrote break-up letters to Tinder and Glow.
Environmental Power and Data
We live in a society with increasingly complex layers of data collection and use. As an individual, it’s often hard to know how to deal with this complexity.
One the one hand data is enabling new types of technologies that give us massive value. On the other, we know our data is being aggregated and used to wield huge power and money.
Anthropologist Deborah Lupton has made the point that “the boundaries between small and big data are porous.” Individuals may not really experience their data as being part of a global set. Their personal data is provided in order to enable products and services that are useful and satisfying which seems like a pretty decent trade-off in the moment. But there is a vague awareness that the individual data is used on a global, aggregated scale in ways we have no knowledge of.
The accuracy of this has been demonstrated vividly by a 2020 Norwegian Consumer Council report which found that ten apps they tested transmitted user data to at least 135 different third parties involved in advertising and/or behavioural profiling.
Data shared ranged from location, age and gender to highly sensitive information about sexuality, religion and drug use, despite such sharing clearly being illegal. The people who use these apps are usually neither aware of who their data is being shared with or what it is being used for.
This is the reason Facebook and Google have become a highly dominant form of power in the modern world. Through ad tech and behavioural profiling, they are able to use data to shape our cultures and our environments in subtle but significant ways that are mostly invisible to us. Shoshana Zuboff has referred to this as the “new global architecture of behavioural modification.”
Everyone’s favourite bald philosopher Micheal Foucault called this ‘environmentalism’- the ability for an environment to be subtly altered in ways that make certain behaviours easy and others difficult. An example of environmental power in the physical world can be seen through the hostile design interventions like bars on benches, studs in doorways and fenced off window ledges to control how public space is used.
In the online world, dark patterns in digital design are used to a similar effect. A great example of this is how cookie notifications online make it very easy to click ‘ok’ and hope for the best, and very hard to decline or even know what you’re consenting to.
As individuals, all of this is opaque to us, hidden behind frictionless UI (except the cookie notification bit). We tend to think of data as an abstraction of the real world, but in fact it is a construction- it requires extensive natural resources and human labour. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s 2018 visual map and essay ‘Anatomy of an AI system’ which maps the impact of an Amazon Echo device on a global scale in terms of human labour, data and resources that are required during its lifespan, from manufacture to disposal, shows this is minute detail.
Using Situated Data Analysis to make this more visible
Situated data analysis is a method developed by Jill Walker Rettberg, professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen in Norway for analysing encoded power relationships in social media platforms and apps between users, platforms, and ideologies.
In simple terms, it’s about looking at the various uses of the data in a particular app or platform using the following categories:
We then went on to do our own simple analysis of Tinder- a dating app, and Glow- a menstrual tracker. I broke down a sample of the data uses for each app and we had a discussion.
Glow makes it clear in their privacy policy that by signing up to the service you are agreeing to share allllllll that data with third-party advertisers. Whilst I am all for empowering women to have more agency over their health, simultaneously selling them things based on their hormone levels may not be ideal.
For Tinder, Monster Match is a game made by Mozilla and Ben Berman that shows how quickly the algorithms narrow down the profiles in your queue using ‘collaborative filtering’, aka partly on your own behaviour and partly on the behaviour of others.
What this means is I only get matched with the profiles other people with similar profiles to me liked. Certain profiles routinely get excluded.
These uses are put into context by placing them alongside the other uses of data, meaning we can have a more specific and detailed discussion about the platforms data use as a whole.
Tinder, ya dumped
We have a very personal connection with our phones and these apps. We share our most personal information. But for a lot of people, seeing the multiple uses of data side by side shifts how they see the value exchange of data for services.
So for the last part of the workshop, we asked whether it was possible for users to exert their power against problematic uses of data.
Because most digital communication is mediated by platforms, we chose to make our own channel for this communication — the most powerful form of analogue communication- the breakup letter.
Using good old pen and paper the workshop participants told the platforms how they felt about their relationship.
Feedback was that it was cathartic.
Idea for the future — kits for breaking up with tech platforms replete with cutsie pre-lined paper, stickers, and pre-paid postage to head offices. It would be called ‘Ya Dumped’.
The slides are available here.
