Dr Aphra Kerr (Maynooth University / IASH Fellow): Are we all Lemmings now? Platform Logics & Data Imaginaries
In 1991 DMA Design, based in Dundee Scotland, released a puzzle-platformer video game called ‘Lemmings’ for the Amiga, Atari and PC. With sales of over 20 million the designer David Jones not only invented a new genre, he also put the Scottish games industry on the international map. DMA Design went on to become Rockstar Games and achieved worldwide success with a rather better known game franchise ‘Grand Theft Auto’. You can visit a statue to the Lemmings game in Dundee. My recent work has examined production, circulation and policy in the global games industry and the datafication of cultural production (Kerr 2017).
While for game fans the concept of the ‘platform’ might mean a simple and repetitive side scrolling game, the general public understanding of the term ‘platform’ has become more synonymous with free digital services offered by companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon in return for personal data. The emergence of a platform ‘logic’ driven by the commodification of data, the ‘intelligence’ of algorithms and the brokerage of a small number of commercial platforms has become synonymous with the contemporary age in many sectors of society. Recently scholars have described this as platform capitalism, platform economics or the ‘platform society’ (Srnicek 2017, Codagnone, Karatzogianni, and Matthews 2019 , van Dijck 2014). It has variously been described as a new gold rush and a new era of colonialism (Beer 2017, Couldry and Mejias 2018).
My project for Spring 2019 is called ‘Data Intermediaries, Data Work & Data Inequalities: Towards Socially Responsible Data Driven Innovation.’ In this work in progress talk I critically engage with official and public discourses surrounding data driven innovation and in particular plans to establish Edinburgh and the South East of Scotland as the data capital of Europe. I ask what are the expectations and imaginaries underpinning these plans (Mansell 2012, van Lente 2012)? Do they envisage ethical or responsible research and innovation (RRI)? If so, whose ethics and values? And who will deliver on these visions? The larger project is concerned with the implications of platform logics and data driven innovation for data workers, cultural production and social reproduction.
Beer, David. 2017. "The data analytics industry and the promises of real-time knowing: perpetuating and deploying a rationality of speed." Journal of Cultural Economy 10 (1):21-33. doi: 10.1080/17530350.2016.1230771.
Codagnone, Cristiano, Athina Karatzogianni, and Jacob Matthews. 2019 Platform Economics. Rhetoric and Reality in the "Sharing Economy", Digital Activism and Society. Croydon, UK: Emerald Publishing.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2018. "Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject." Television & New Media 0 (0):1527476418796632. doi: 10.1177/1527476418796632.
Kerr, Aphra. 2017. Global Games. Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Age. New York: Routledge.
Mansell, Robin. 2012. Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation, and Governance: Oxford University Press, USA.
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism Cambridge, UK Polity
van Dijck, Jose. 2014. "Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology." Surveillance & Society 12 (2):197-208.
van Lente, Harro. 2012. "Navigating foresight in a sea of expectations: lessons from the sociology of expectations " Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 24 (8):769-782. doi: 10.1080/09537325.2012.715478.