Caroline Bassett

Plenty as a response to austerity? Big Data expertise, cultures and communities

Big Data promises informational abundance – something that might be useful to cultures and communities in times of austerity. However many local organizations lack the skills to develop expertise in new forms of computation or the desire to develop them; Big Data is often viewed as the terrain of Big Business and Big Government. Drawing on issues arising from action research into Big Data and community in Brighton, England, this article explores questions of technological expertise in relation to Big Data, everyday life and critical practice – the latter understood as something that may be undertaken not only as a theoretical but also as an operational endeavour. The outcome of the article is thus not a prescription for training but a series of questions concerning desirable forms of co-constitution: How should expertise be shared between humans and machines?

Not Now? Feminism, Technology, Postdigital

‘Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’ — so said John Perry Barlow in the 1990s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which diagnosed and made demands around a new reality. A quarter of a century later, in the era of the quantified self, in which computational devices and bodies intertwine to measure the human day and co-constitute the world in which we live, it is clear that something has changed. This change concerns the materialization of bodies, a classic feminist preoccupation, as well as the materials of technology — ours is a world that is everywhere and nowhere, in which bodies are redistributed through a technological economy. But the sense of distance this change engenders applies not only to the matter-free and invulnerable lives Barlow glimpsed in the 20th-century net,1 but to the early 21st-century web (pre/post-9/ll) and later; even voices celebrating the social in the Web 2.0, or the pre-Snowden era, sound distant now.

Canonicalism and the Computational Turn

This chapter considers the computational turn in relation to some of the diverse frameworks through which digital artifacts and practices, taken separately or explored in various configurations, are being defined, categorised, and claimed for various disciplines, sub-disciplines, anti-disciplines, or academic fields; for this tradition or that. In this process of course not only the artifacts and practices,but also the frameworks themselves, are being reconstituted. If the latter are rendered computational in various ways, the former are hacked into shape,rendered fit, or made amenable and suitable for certain modes of analysis. This kind of work might thus redefine conventional takes on computation and its (cultural, social, economic, aesthetic, material) significance, replace the traditional object of enquiry within a particular field with its computationally transformed upgrade, and relocate the field itself so that it extends across new terrain – or operates in new dimensions.

Impossible, Admirable, Androgyne: Firestone, Technology, and Utopia

As I write this chapter confirmation drifts in from the radio; forty years on Shulamith Firestone’s hopes for new forms of automated reproduction have not been realized—but neither have they been abandoned. Despite many developments in reproductive technology, they remain, as they were in her time, “almost possible.” On closer listening it turns out that humans would not be the first of the vertebrates to get their act (un)together: Komodo dragons, whose island living easily isolates them, have been doing it for ages. Afterward, the dragon has sex with its progeny and things return to their usual oviparous state. The Radio 4 conclusion is that “nature always finds a way.” For dragons, perhaps; for humans the agency enabling various forms of nonstandard reproduction is likely to be techno-science, a means through which we change our sense of what nature is.