What’s intimate about data flows? Who tracks what or whom? Why should we care?
Digital media is, especially in these times of social distancing, infrastructural in how we navigate the obligations of work, studies and social life. Devices, apps and services both generate and leak data as we message, do searches, post on social media, track our number of steps or match with someone on a dating app. All kinds of daily routines give rise to data shadows reflective of our habits, likes and intimate attachments.
Our seminar asks, what is at stake in data-driven technologies both shaping and invading everyday life.
The invited speakers are the world’s leading experts within the fields of research on intimacy, data and the digital world.
Program, 23.10.2020, 10:00-13:00 EET
Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, “Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture”
Susanna Paasonen’s work focuses on internet research, affect theory and sexuality. She is the PI of Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture.
Deborah Lupton, University of New South Wales, “More-than-Human Data Intimacies”
Deborah Lupton has a background in sociology and media and cultural studies. She is the author/co-author of 17 books and editor/co-editor of six book collections, as well as many chapters and articles, ranging across such topics as health and medicine, food, the body, the emotions and affect, risk, parenthood, digital technologies and cultures of data.
Irina Shklovski, University of Copenhagen, “The Perils of Visibility: Why the digital world is inevitably creepy”
Irina Shklovski seeks to answer how to design to exploit technology’s usefulness without exploiting its users. This drives her research in three areas: privacy and creepy technologies, ethics and responsibility in innovation, and how to address the sense of powerlessness people experience in the face of massive personal data collection.
Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki, “Self-Tracking and the Limits of Intimacy”
Minna Ruckenstein works as an associate professor at the Consumer Society Research Centre and the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. Her research group explores digitalization/datafication by highlighting emotional, social, political and economic aspects of current and emerging data practices.