„Everything that you are doing online is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured - every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. Exactly what image you stop and look at. For how long you look at it.“ Jeff Seibert, Twitter
This is a continuously growing collection of talks, conferences and texts that I have come across during my ongoing research on smartphone photography and which I consider worth spreading!
In fact exploring smartphone photography culture has lead me to delve into various topics. Starting from a close observation of initially innocent or helpful features - like the automatic creation of albums of those people you have photographed most - I came to explore that there was much more going on in/ via my phone and started asking questions like:
How does image recognition software work? How do Algorithms perceive (visual) data? How intelligent is AI? Why do we believe in the objectivity of machines and numbers - where does this cult around abstract symbols come from? What is the technical infrastructure behind our smartphone communication and who owns what ( content/software/hardware/internet providers/data centers/ wifi hotspots/ electricity masts and undersea cables)? Being my close companion all day round what information do the sensors of my smartphone gather and who gets access to this? ( For example photo/ maps/ health and fitness tracking apps) How do digital companies create user profiles? How do smartphones help match and refine data on online and offline behavior? Why does Google Maps show me exactly this route? Do all the other billions of maps users also follow Google as blindly as I do? What is happening/ will happen to all the data that we share via our phones? How could Big Data benefit citizens rather than commercial or political interests? Being a permanently accessible window to the world, how much has the smartphone already changed and shaped our perception of and interaction with reality?
Even if this site is still under construction I hope you enjoy the thoughts, analyses and critiques I started to gather here. If you like to discuss or share something feel welcome to drop me a line!
Data Sets / Predictive Analytics / Surveillance Capitalism on (training) data collection, user profiles and behavior commodification
Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy
Shoshana Zuboff at HIIG, Berlin
It is 2000, and the dot.com crisis has caused deep wounds when Google discovers that the "residual data" that people leave behind in their searches on the internet is very precious and tradable. This residual data can be used to predict the behavior of the internet user. Internet advertisements can, therefore, be used in a very targeted and effective way. A completely new business model is born: "surveillance capitalism.“ In this talk, Zuboff reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but the citizen itself, serves as a raw material.
Cambridge Analytica,
The Power of Big Data and Psychographics
You remember the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandale after the Trump elections? This is a talk by Cambridge Analytica's CEO on the companies approach to audience targeting, data modeling, and psychographic profiling. Or in other words, on how to get detailed insights to peoples personalities via their social media accounts in order to influence their political opinions.
Tracking / Datafication:
Online to Offline 2.0,
Experiments and Examples from China
Let the industry speak: "In this short talk - originally delivered at Wall Street Journal's D.Live Asia conference April 2018 - Connie Chan gives insights into what it means to go from "mobile first" to mobile only -- where one's phone isn't just an access point, but an entry point... And where even physical spaces, not just websites, could be personalized to us."
AI / Algorithmic Governance / Ecological and Social Responsibilities:
Anatomy of AI,
Kate Crawford at UNSW Centre for Ideas, Sydney
Artificial intelligence (AI) is hard to see – but it’s already being built into the infrastructure of our core institutions, from education, business, healthcare, hiring, to the work of government itself. But what actually is “artificial intelligence,” particularly when it’s deployed in our homes and workplaces? Encased in sleek consumer products like the Amazon Echo, we rarely consider the vast underlying network of data collection, exploitation of human labor, and physical resource extraction. All have enormous implications for society and the environment.
Datafication, dataism and dataveillance,
Prof. José van Dijck at Institute for Information Law
The popularization of datafication as a neutral paradigm is carried by a widespread belief and supported by institutional guardians of trust. That notion of trust becomes problematic when it leads to dataveillance by a number of institutions that handle people’s (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology (“dataism”) prompts us to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.
Colonised by data – the hollowing out of digital society,
Nick Couldry at HIIG Berlin
The current datafication of society not only brings about another iteration of capitalism, but also a new form of colonialism. We are witnessing the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism: in short, the emergence of a new data colonialism, based on the appropriation of human life through data, that will pave the way for a new capitalism that it is as yet too early to name.
Our lives with algorithms,
Louise Amoore at HIIG Berlin
From detecting anomalies in the landscape of medical images to drone footage to the influencing of elections, machine learning algorithms are transforming radically how we make sense in society. Deep neural net algorithms condense the features of a scene to an output of meaning – such as “a man is throwing a frisbee in a park”, “a woman is standing at the border fence with a crowd in the background”, “the protesters are gathering in the city square”. They reduce the intractable difficulties and the undecidability of what could be happening in a scene into a single meaning that is informing decisions and actions. Is that hate speech or freedom of speech, are people pickpocketing or cuddling, is this a protestor or a terrorist?
Digitalisation / Mathematics / Power on cultures of abstraction and our history of believing in numbers:
Image Recognition / Algorithmic + Human Perception (How) does AI see and think?