Article
ID: CBB779695946

Databases and Doppelgängers: New Articulations of Power (2018)

unapi
Surveillance Power (social sciences) Social media Relational databases; management Big data Data mining Data collection; methods Databases 21st century

This article explores the power and efficacy of databases as part of the turn to intensive datafication in contemporary life in which we are all enfolded within a datafied milieu: a catalogued and curated data assemblage comprising aspects of our life. This assemblage of people, processes, and things is described as having a generative power—data power—producing not the "one" profiled individual, but the many multiple proxies out of the data assemblage. I reimagine the profiled individual through the literary figure of the doppelgänger: a data doppelgänger that gestures to difference and repetition and all that is ambiguously changeable within digital culture. Thinking with the data doppelgänger to interrogate the profiling apparatus enables a more complex understanding of data power beyond panoptic metaphors that ground the subject in descriptive and spectral terms rather than performative simulations. To illustrate aspects of the contemporary profiling apparatus, I briefly explore the troubling relationship between Facebook and the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to demonstrate how effective profiling systems are when enriched with large, social datasets.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB779695946/

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Authors & Contributors
Drage, Matthew
Siibak, Andra
Brian Jordan Jefferson
Włodzimierz Gogołek
Moats, David
Alexander Trauth-Goik
Journals
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
Science, Technology and Human Values
Social Studies of Science
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
History of the Human Sciences
History of Psychology
Publishers
University of Chicago Press
University of Nebraska Press
University of Minnesota Press
MIT Press
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
University of Chicago
Concepts
Data collection; methods
Big data
Technology and society
Databases
Information technology
Relational databases; management
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
United States
China
Great Britain
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