The oppositional affordances of data activism

Dimitra L Milioni,Venetia Papa

doi:10.1177/1329878x221074795

Dimitra L Milioni, Venetia Papa

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x221074795

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Abstract

This study draws on several data activism projects and applies discursive interface analysis to understand the material means by which activist software strives to empower users vis-à-vis data power. The analysis uncovers four types of oppositional affordances: (i) enabling the use of hidden affordances (ii) imagining new affordances (iii) creating meta-affordances (resignifying perceptible affordances of corporate platforms and reconstructing their meaning), and (iv) creating anti-affordances (hindering or distorting corporate platforms’ affordances to the extent that they do not perform their intended function). Although not without limitations, oppositional affordances reveal the actual agentic possibilities of data activism for users other than activists to affect the very algorithms that produce them as datafied subjects. The proposed typology provides a means for further empirical analysis of critical software and its subversive potential for users. The article concludes with a critical discussion of data activism as a means of vernacular critical praxis.

Highlights

Having briefly introduced the emerging practice of data activism, we focus on affordance theory to situate our analysis, reviewing latest approaches and suggesting further nuances
The empirical part of the study draws on a diverse set of projects to explore the following question: what kind of affordances do data activists provide everyday users and how do these affordances mediate the perception and experience of corporate platforms? In other words, how does data activism software attempt to empower users and render corporate platforms permeable to user agency?
New, meta- and anti-affordances created by data activism projects, ‘ordinary’ users are offered the possibility to reflexively modify their behaviour online and affect the very algorithms that produce them as datafied subjects

Summary

Introduction

The emerging practice of data activismRemember ‘Google bombing’? Back in the 2000s, internet users were witnessing the at times amusing effects of a tactic that took advantage of the Google search algorithm to make a – usually– political statement, such as typing ‘miserable failure’ to get linked to the biography of George W. The empirical part of the study draws on a diverse set of projects to explore the following question: what kind of affordances do data activists provide everyday users and how do these affordances mediate the perception and experience of corporate platforms?

Results

Conclusion