The Digital Ethnography Collective hosted this event with Professor Veronica Barassi on Wednesday 28th April 2021. Veronica talked about her new book 'Child Data Citizen: How Tech Companies are Profiling Us from Before Birth' (MIT Press, 2020) and her experience as an ethnographer in making sense of the datafication of family life. By looking at the human tensions and sensory experience of datafication, she reflected on the merits and challenges of ethnography and autoethnography in the understanding of our complex data environments.
SPEAKER BIO:
Veronica Barassi is an anthropologist, the mother of two daughters, and Professor in Media and Communication Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS-HSG) at the University of St. Gallen, as well as the Chair of Media and Culture at the MCM Institute (MCM-HSG). She was previously a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University of London, where she launched together with her colleagues the Goldsmiths Media Ethnography Group. Her work has appeared in top-ranked international journals and edited collections. Her first book, Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism (Routledge, 2015), was the product of years of ethnographic research (funded by the AHRC and the British Academy) on digital participation and social media campaigning. Her TED Talk on What Tech Companies know about Children has reached more than 1.6 million views. At the moment she is launching a new project titled The Human Error: AI, Human Rights and the Conflict over Algorithmic Profiling.
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
'Child Data Citizen: How Tech-Companies are Profiling Us From Before Birth' is the direct result of the Child | Data | Citizen project. The book explores the datafication of children and its democratic implications. Today, for the first time in history we are tracking individual children from long before they are born. From the moment in which a child is conceived, important biometric information is uploaded on social media or pregnancy apps. As children grow up, most of their health and educational data is digitized, archived and sold by privately owned corporations. All these different forms of data monitoring and processing are just the tip of the iceberg. The picture becomes much more complex if we consider the role played by home hubs, artificial intelligence devices, and facial recognition technologies. What is becoming obvious is that children’s personal information is now being collected, archived, sold and profiled in ways that were not possible before. The book talks directly about this transformation, and critically reflects on its implications for our society and our democratic futures.
The book focuses on four different typologies of children’s data: health data, education data, home life data and social media data. It has been written by an anthropologist and a parent, who spent three years working with families in the UK and the US and analyzing the complex ways in which children’s data is being produced, collected, aggregated, and shared. The author combines intimate stories about data-tracking in family life, parental consent, and ‘sharenting’ with a critical investigation into the privacy policies, business models, patents applications and sharing agreements that allow companies and other agents to mine children’s data. Barassi argues that when we think about children’s data traces the question at heart is not only one about privacy, but about how these data traces may be used by AI systems and predictive analytics to profile them throughout their lives, and define them in public, as citizens. By engaging with critical question about algorithmic bias, AI ethics and data justice, the book asks what are the social and political implications of building a society where data traces are made to talk for and about citizens across a life-time? And how can we protect ourselves when we realize that the ‘predictions’ and narratives that algorithms construct about individuals are reductionist, discriminatory and, in the case of children, pre-emptive representations of who they are?
~We are The Digital Ethnography Collective, an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods. We invite scholars at all levels to join us for events where we host speakers and workshop new ideas. The aim of the group to establish a community of scholars of digital ethnography and to work through challenges in this emerging subdiscipline. Follow us on Twitter (@DigECollective) and join our mailing list to hear about exciting new scholarship in this area as well as updates on all of our future events.~
