M Ruckenstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 14346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Ruckenstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Ruckenstein |
| SIGNATURE | RUCKENSTEIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7600-1419 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 459 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Epic disappointment: Physicians’ experiences of steerability in data-driven healthcare
This paper examines discrepancies between expectations and actual data management practices in healthcare. It develops the concept of steerability to demonstrate how guidance provided by integrated, multipurpose patient data management systems functions as a sociotechnical feature and a core value in emerging data-driven healthcare, and what happens when the promises of an all-encompassing data infrastructure fail. The paper analyses physician’s …
The Darker Qualities of Repair
This article investigates the darker dimensions of repair, departing from STS scholarship that portrays repair as a productive force of learning and renewal. It focuses on moments when repair fails to generate insight or restore stability, examining the aftermath of the Apotti data management platform’s implementation in Finland. Drawing on documents outlining the platform’s aims and discussions with medical doctors, the analysis traces persisten…
The unhappy marriage of standardization and activation policy: Welfare bureaucracy and service professionalism in delivering digital social assistance in Finland
This article explores the intricate relationship between standardization and activation within the framework of digital welfare provision. It highlights the critical connection between benefits and services in the activation process and the challenges posed by the misalignment of their administrative logics against the backdrop of digitalizing active social policy. The findings from the Finnish Social Barometer surveys (2018 and 2019) illustrates…
Nothing is inevitable: The flexibility imaginary in the Chinese platform economy
This article explores how the political–economic balancing of state interests and potential state intervention influences everyday perceptions of platform companies in China. We introduce the term “flexibility imaginary” to describe the adaptability and responsiveness exhibited by our research participants in Hangzhou amid changing conditions and unforeseen transitions. Focusing on the flexibility imaginary aids in unpacking the assumptions, valu…
Friction and Promise in Data Labor
This article develops friction as a methodological lens and mobilizes it to examine an unusual data labor arrangement in Finnish prisons. The concept of friction highlights how penal policies in a Nordic welfare state both support and intervene in tendencies to view data labor as a uniform future development. While the friction lens draws attention to infrastructural arrangements and institutional forces, it also foregrounds human involvement, im…
Algorithmic configurations in caring arrangements
This article examines heterogeneous forms of human relationalities with algorithms envisioned in the development of a public algorithmic system and their anticipated effects. To do that, we focus on the distinct shapes given to both technologies and people by discourses and practices, together with their underlying logics and associated values. Analysing the blog posts documenting the emergence of Omaolo, a digital platform for healthcare and soc…
Time to re-humanize algorithmic systems
A Conversation with Marilyn Strathern
Professor Strathern recently delivered the 25th annual Westermarck Memorial Lecture in Helsinki: the lecture, titled 'Comparing Concerns', was published in issue 4/2009 of Suomen Antropologi. In the lecture Professor Strathern highlighted a number of unvoiced assumptions prevalent in the fields of organ, tissue and blood donations, through a comparison of contexts that are often considered incompatible. This is a perspective that has been dominan…
Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital: Reflection
Dimensions of autonomy in human–algorithm relations
This article reorients research on agentic engagements with algorithms from the perspective of autonomy. We separate two horizons of algorithmic relations – the instrumental and the intimate – and analyse how they shape different dimensions of autonomous agency. Against the instrumental horizon, algorithmic systems are technical procedures ordering social life at a distance and using rules that can only partly be known. Autonomy is activated as r…
Trouble with autonomy in behavioral insurance
In this article, we study how people define, negotiate, and perform autonomy in relation to digital technologies, specifically in connection with behavioral insurance policies that involve forms of data tracking and health services. The article builds on focus group discussions, which we treat as a dynamic site of ethico-political deliberation to test ideas, talk about boundaries of acceptable control, and envision future scenarios. The ethico-po…
Tracking lives, forging markets
In the insurance industry, digital technologies have been harnessed in pursuit of three goals: personalising services for customers, obtaining information about them and nudging them towards behaviour that diminishes their risks. This article examines two Finnish companies that use self-tracking practices and sensor-generated data in life insurance products. It investigates the knowledges and practices mobilised in a design process that aims to t…
In the Shadows of the Digital Economy: The Ghost Work of Infrastructural Labor
What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in moder…
Algorithms, advertising and the intimacy of surveillance
This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time…
Re-humanizing the platform: Content moderators and the logic of care
With the goal of re-humanizing discussion platform operations, this study explores the knowledge and aims of commercial content moderators by reframing their work-related ideals through the notion of the “logic of care.” In seeking to expand their professional realm by realigning users, moderators, and technical tools, moderators of discussion forums have turned to machines, ideally freeing up resources for real-time interaction between moderator…
The social imaginaries of data activism
Data activism, promoting new forms of civic and political engagement, has emerged as a response to problematic aspects of datafication that include tensions between data openness and data ownership, and asymmetries in terms of data usage and distribution. In this article, we discuss MyData, a data activism initiative originating in Finland, which aims to shape a more sustainable citizen-centric data economy by means of increasing individuals' con…
Par-delà le Quantified Self: Exploration thématique d’un paradigme dataïste
Nous examinerons dans cet article la métaphore du Quantified Self (QS) telle qu'elle est présentée dans le magazine Wired (2008-2012), où nous avons identifié quatre thèmes interdépendants - transparence, optimisation, boucles de rétroaction et biohacking - comme fondements de la définition d'un nouveau soi numérique et de la diffusion d'un paradigme dataïste. En suggérant que le QS fait jouer aux dispositifs et applications d'autosuivi un rôle d…
Tracing medicinal agencies: Antidepressants and life-effects
This article is inspired by the social life of methods approach, joining a movement among social scientists engaging with 'big data' to contribute to methodological innovation and conceptual development in research and knowledge translation. It explores human-drug associations using a computational tool, Medicine Radar, meanwhile raising questions about the ways a digital device pushes us to rethink how drugs are known in the everyday. Medicine R…
Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies
Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews th…
Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world
In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from munda…
Digital consumption
The era of digitalization is shaping consumption practices in ways that continue to blur the boundaries between business initiatives and the everyday. This chapter demonstrates that research on consumption can avoid the market analysis stance by promoting a more dynamic view of the market and value formation. The aim throughout is to stay attentive to the defining features of digital consumption, while introducing research findings that treat dig…
Social rhythms of the heart
A long-term research focus on the temporality of everyday life has become revitalised with new tracking technologies that allow methodological experimentation and innovation. This article approaches rhythms of daily lives with heart-rate variability measurements that use algorithms to discover physiological stress and recovery. In the spirit of the 'social life of methods' approach, we aggregated individual data (n = 35) in order to uncover tempo…
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm
This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-trackin…
The heart of everyday analytics: Emotional, Material and Practical Extensions in Self-Tracking Market
As a result of digital and mobile technology, various kinds of monitoring practices are moving back and forth knowledge hierarchies. The analytics of bodily and mental functions is no longer the privileged domain of professionals. This essay focuses on the ways in which everyday analytics, heart-rate monitoring in particular, becomes embedded and normalized in daily practices and by doing so, paves the way for new market developments. The discuss…
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles
A field of personal analytics has emerged around self-monitoring practices, which includes the visualization and interpretation of the data produced. This paper explores personal analytics from the perspective of self-optimization, arguing that the ways in which people confront and engage with visualized personal data are as significant as the technology itself. The paper leans on the concept of the “data double”: the conversion of human bodies a…
Algorithms, advertising and the intimacy of surveillance
This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time…
Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies
Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews th…
Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world
In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from munda…
Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm
This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-trackin…
The heart of everyday analytics: Emotional, Material and Practical Extensions in Self-Tracking Market
As a result of digital and mobile technology, various kinds of monitoring practices are moving back and forth knowledge hierarchies. The analytics of bodily and mental functions is no longer the privileged domain of professionals. This essay focuses on the ways in which everyday analytics, heart-rate monitoring in particular, becomes embedded and normalized in daily practices and by doing so, paves the way for new market developments. The discuss…
Re-humanizing the platform: Content moderators and the logic of care
With the goal of re-humanizing discussion platform operations, this study explores the knowledge and aims of commercial content moderators by reframing their work-related ideals through the notion of the “logic of care.” In seeking to expand their professional realm by realigning users, moderators, and technical tools, moderators of discussion forums have turned to machines, ideally freeing up resources for real-time interaction between moderator…
The social imaginaries of data activism
Data activism, promoting new forms of civic and political engagement, has emerged as a response to problematic aspects of datafication that include tensions between data openness and data ownership, and asymmetries in terms of data usage and distribution. In this article, we discuss MyData, a data activism initiative originating in Finland, which aims to shape a more sustainable citizen-centric data economy by means of increasing individuals' con…
Tracking lives, forging markets
In the insurance industry, digital technologies have been harnessed in pursuit of three goals: personalising services for customers, obtaining information about them and nudging them towards behaviour that diminishes their risks. This article examines two Finnish companies that use self-tracking practices and sensor-generated data in life insurance products. It investigates the knowledges and practices mobilised in a design process that aims to t…
Spatial extensions of childhood: From toy worlds to online communities
Digital technologies offer children opportunities to expand their everyday worlds and manipulate their spatial surroundings in real time. This article draws from ethnographic research in Helsinki focusing on children's sociality and technology encounters. Particular attention is given to techno-toys and online networking communities. Connections between companies developing digital technologies and children's everyday spaces give rise to new gene…
Playing Nintendogs: Desire, distributed agency and potentials of prosumption
This article focuses on participatory forms of capitalism, children’s consumer desires and engagements with a game console. The Nintendo DS is needed in order to enter a gaming world where relationships are built between children and non-human objects with human-like capacities. The discussion proposes that playing a simulation game, Nintendogs, tells us a more general story about how social relations are affected and shaped by technologies. In o…
Time scales of consumption: Children, money and transactional orders
Recent research into children’s consumption argues for the centrality of children and childhood in rethinking and revising notions of consumer culture. This article introduces the model of time scales of consumption for exploring children’s talk about money. An analysis of short- and long-term cycles of exchange opens for scrutiny the complex ways in which children are affected by, and contribute to, processes of consumption. Culturally, money is…
Trouble with autonomy in behavioral insurance
In this article, we study how people define, negotiate, and perform autonomy in relation to digital technologies, specifically in connection with behavioral insurance policies that involve forms of data tracking and health services. The article builds on focus group discussions, which we treat as a dynamic site of ethico-political deliberation to test ideas, talk about boundaries of acceptable control, and envision future scenarios. The ethico-po…
Dimensions of autonomy in human–algorithm relations
This article reorients research on agentic engagements with algorithms from the perspective of autonomy. We separate two horizons of algorithmic relations – the instrumental and the intimate – and analyse how they shape different dimensions of autonomous agency. Against the instrumental horizon, algorithmic systems are technical procedures ordering social life at a distance and using rules that can only partly be known. Autonomy is activated as r…
Par-delà le Quantified Self: Exploration thématique d’un paradigme dataïste
Nous examinerons dans cet article la métaphore du Quantified Self (QS) telle qu'elle est présentée dans le magazine Wired (2008-2012), où nous avons identifié quatre thèmes interdépendants - transparence, optimisation, boucles de rétroaction et biohacking - comme fondements de la définition d'un nouveau soi numérique et de la diffusion d'un paradigme dataïste. En suggérant que le QS fait jouer aux dispositifs et applications d'autosuivi un rôle d…
Social rhythms of the heart
A long-term research focus on the temporality of everyday life has become revitalised with new tracking technologies that allow methodological experimentation and innovation. This article approaches rhythms of daily lives with heart-rate variability measurements that use algorithms to discover physiological stress and recovery. In the spirit of the 'social life of methods' approach, we aggregated individual data (n = 35) in order to uncover tempo…
Toying with the world: Children, virtual pets and the value of mobility
This article approaches childhood as an emergent condition in which children, their caregivers and toys all take an active part and argues that the focus on toys opens important insights for studying processes of social reproduction and change. This is demonstrated by describing children's interactions with virtual pets that encourage children to become mobile in a manner that is only possible through digital technologies. This mobility is at hea…
Tracing medicinal agencies: Antidepressants and life-effects
This article is inspired by the social life of methods approach, joining a movement among social scientists engaging with 'big data' to contribute to methodological innovation and conceptual development in research and knowledge translation. It explores human-drug associations using a computational tool, Medicine Radar, meanwhile raising questions about the ways a digital device pushes us to rethink how drugs are known in the everyday. Medicine R…
The unhappy marriage of standardization and activation policy: Welfare bureaucracy and service professionalism in delivering digital social assistance in Finland
This article explores the intricate relationship between standardization and activation within the framework of digital welfare provision. It highlights the critical connection between benefits and services in the activation process and the challenges posed by the misalignment of their administrative logics against the backdrop of digitalizing active social policy. The findings from the Finnish Social Barometer surveys (2018 and 2019) illustrates…
Tamagotchi in the Kindergarten: From Japanese toy markets to children’s discourse communities
The study of processes of consumption, of engagements with toys, media and technology, is an emerging research agenda for the anthropology of children and childhood (Schwartzman 2001: 10). The interest in the topic reflects the growing economical potential of the so-called 'kids market' (McNeal 1997); it seems that in the wealthier parts of the world '[t]o be a child is to be a consumer within a very specific market' (Langer 2004: 255). Consumpti…
Currencies and Capitalisms on the Internet
The internet is a particularly vibrant arena of economical development and transformation, because it brings together producers, distributors and consumers in a highly efficient manner. By doing so, it enables the exploration of innovative concepts without having to build costly new facilities. Thus the internet has become a living lab, which is used by people all over the world for creating and developing new economical forms. Anthropology offer…
Globalization as a Distinctively Mediterranean Cultural Projec
Culture, Value, and Anthropological Theory: An interview with Joel Robbins
The discussion, titled Anthropology matters, was held before an audience that included quite a few students as well as faculty. The interview which preceded general discussion was conducted by Minna Ruckenstein, President of the Finnish Anthropological Society, and has been transcribed, lightly edited to improve readability, and appears below. During the course of the discussion, Robbins talked about his research among the Urapmin of Papua New Gu…
Tamagotchi in the Kindergarten: From Japanese toy markets to children’s discourse communities
The study of processes of consumption, of engagements with toys, media and technology, is an emerging research agenda for the anthropology of children and childhood (Schwartzman 2001: 10). The interest in the topic reflects the growing economical potential of the so-called 'kids market' (McNeal 1997); it seems that in the wealthier parts of the world '[t]o be a child is to be a consumer within a very specific market' (Langer 2004: 255). Consumpti…
Time scales of consumption: Children, money and transactional orders
Recent research into children’s consumption argues for the centrality of children and childhood in rethinking and revising notions of consumer culture. This article introduces the model of time scales of consumption for exploring children’s talk about money. An analysis of short- and long-term cycles of exchange opens for scrutiny the complex ways in which children are affected by, and contribute to, processes of consumption. Culturally, money is…
Toying with the world: Children, virtual pets and the value of mobility
This article approaches childhood as an emergent condition in which children, their caregivers and toys all take an active part and argues that the focus on toys opens important insights for studying processes of social reproduction and change. This is demonstrated by describing children's interactions with virtual pets that encourage children to become mobile in a manner that is only possible through digital technologies. This mobility is at hea…
Children in Creationist Capitalism: The corporate value of sociality
The term ‘creationist capitalism’ attempts to capture a shift or a trend in capitalism that is currently being described as a move away from consumption to that of prosumption. At the heart of prosumption is the intertwining of economic profit-making with individual creativity. This study explores how creationist capitalism is produced and pushed forward in corporate practices and understandings. Particular attention is paid to virtual worlds tha…
Spatial extensions of childhood: From toy worlds to online communities
Digital technologies offer children opportunities to expand their everyday worlds and manipulate their spatial surroundings in real time. This article draws from ethnographic research in Helsinki focusing on children's sociality and technology encounters. Particular attention is given to techno-toys and online networking communities. Connections between companies developing digital technologies and children's everyday spaces give rise to new gene…
Playing Nintendogs: Desire, distributed agency and potentials of prosumption
This article focuses on participatory forms of capitalism, children’s consumer desires and engagements with a game console. The Nintendo DS is needed in order to enter a gaming world where relationships are built between children and non-human objects with human-like capacities. The discussion proposes that playing a simulation game, Nintendogs, tells us a more general story about how social relations are affected and shaped by technologies. In o…
Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles
A field of personal analytics has emerged around self-monitoring practices, which includes the visualization and interpretation of the data produced. This paper explores personal analytics from the perspective of self-optimization, arguing that the ways in which people confront and engage with visualized personal data are as significant as the technology itself. The paper leans on the concept of the “data double”: the conversion of human bodies a…
Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm
This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-trackin…
The heart of everyday analytics: Emotional, Material and Practical Extensions in Self-Tracking Market
As a result of digital and mobile technology, various kinds of monitoring practices are moving back and forth knowledge hierarchies. The analytics of bodily and mental functions is no longer the privileged domain of professionals. This essay focuses on the ways in which everyday analytics, heart-rate monitoring in particular, becomes embedded and normalized in daily practices and by doing so, paves the way for new market developments. The discuss…
Digital consumption
The era of digitalization is shaping consumption practices in ways that continue to blur the boundaries between business initiatives and the everyday. This chapter demonstrates that research on consumption can avoid the market analysis stance by promoting a more dynamic view of the market and value formation. The aim throughout is to stay attentive to the defining features of digital consumption, while introducing research findings that treat dig…
Social rhythms of the heart
A long-term research focus on the temporality of everyday life has become revitalised with new tracking technologies that allow methodological experimentation and innovation. This article approaches rhythms of daily lives with heart-rate variability measurements that use algorithms to discover physiological stress and recovery. In the spirit of the 'social life of methods' approach, we aggregated individual data (n = 35) in order to uncover tempo…
The Datafication of Health
Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of "datafication" or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastru…
Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies
Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews th…
Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world
In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from munda…
Re-humanizing the platform: Content moderators and the logic of care
With the goal of re-humanizing discussion platform operations, this study explores the knowledge and aims of commercial content moderators by reframing their work-related ideals through the notion of the “logic of care.” In seeking to expand their professional realm by realigning users, moderators, and technical tools, moderators of discussion forums have turned to machines, ideally freeing up resources for real-time interaction between moderator…
The social imaginaries of data activism
Data activism, promoting new forms of civic and political engagement, has emerged as a response to problematic aspects of datafication that include tensions between data openness and data ownership, and asymmetries in terms of data usage and distribution. In this article, we discuss MyData, a data activism initiative originating in Finland, which aims to shape a more sustainable citizen-centric data economy by means of increasing individuals' con…
Par-delà le Quantified Self: Exploration thématique d’un paradigme dataïste
Nous examinerons dans cet article la métaphore du Quantified Self (QS) telle qu'elle est présentée dans le magazine Wired (2008-2012), où nous avons identifié quatre thèmes interdépendants - transparence, optimisation, boucles de rétroaction et biohacking - comme fondements de la définition d'un nouveau soi numérique et de la diffusion d'un paradigme dataïste. En suggérant que le QS fait jouer aux dispositifs et applications d'autosuivi un rôle d…
Tracing medicinal agencies: Antidepressants and life-effects
This article is inspired by the social life of methods approach, joining a movement among social scientists engaging with 'big data' to contribute to methodological innovation and conceptual development in research and knowledge translation. It explores human-drug associations using a computational tool, Medicine Radar, meanwhile raising questions about the ways a digital device pushes us to rethink how drugs are known in the everyday. Medicine R…
In the Shadows of the Digital Economy: The Ghost Work of Infrastructural Labor
What does digital piecework have in common with laboring in the warehouse of a large online shopping platform? How is data cleaning related to digitization work and AI training in prisons? This panel suggests bringing these diverse ways of laboring in the digital economies together by considering these practices as infrastructural labor that takes the shape of shadow work (Illich, 1981) and ghost labor (Gray & Suri, 2019). Work and labor in moder…
Algorithms, advertising and the intimacy of surveillance
This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time…
Tracking lives, forging markets
In the insurance industry, digital technologies have been harnessed in pursuit of three goals: personalising services for customers, obtaining information about them and nudging them towards behaviour that diminishes their risks. This article examines two Finnish companies that use self-tracking practices and sensor-generated data in life insurance products. It investigates the knowledges and practices mobilised in a design process that aims to t…
Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital: Reflection
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (9 works)