Recovering critique in an age of datafication

Nick Couldry

doi:10.1177/1461444820912536

Abstract

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

Highlights

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world
If a major intellectual, civic, battle about datafication and its implications for ‘society’ is under way, how well-placed are the social sciences to wage this battle? Do we have the tools to get in view what is problematic about datafication for social life? Do we have a clear enough idea any more of what should count as critique, and on what empirical and normative resources it depends? Academic critique can play an important role in civil society’s response to this incipient datafication of the social world
It is not that Actor Network Theory (ANT)/STS lack accounts of how something like definitional power emerges for certain purposes (Callon and Latour, 1981); it is rather that they seem uninterested in the force and long-term consequences for social life in general that follow from such power

Summary

Introduction

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. It is hard to see how the tradition of ANT/STS, given its default scepticism about broader theorizations of the social world, can help us answer key questions required of critical accounts of datafication, even in Latour’s (2013) latest development of his position.

Results

Conclusion