Data publics: public plurality in an era of data determinacy

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of contributors -- Introduction -- PART I Politics -- 1 In praise of plasticity: underspecification, anarchism, machine learning -- 2 Data capitalism, sociogenic prediction, and recursive indeterminacies -- 3 Emotariat accelerationism and the republic of data -- PART II Environments -- 4 Unearthly domain: the enigmatic data publics of satellites -- 5 Sensing air, creaturing data -- 6 Offsite: data, migration, landscape, materiality -- 7 Fracking sociality: architecture, real estate, and the internet's new urbanism -- PART III Platforms -- 8 Platform urbanism: city-making in the age of platforms -- 9 The aesthetic society: or how I edit my Instagram -- 10 Publics or post-publics? Contemporary expression after the mobile phone -- Index.

"Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms. By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organization; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Data Publics will be of great interest to academics and students in the fields of computer science, philosophy, sociology, media and communication studies, architecture, visual culture, art and design, and urban and cultural studies"--