April 2017

The Archives

• Biography, Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Life Writing

  Data Portraits: Identity, Privacy, and Surveillance

  30.04.17 | Permalink | Comments Off on Data Portraits: Identity, Privacy, and Surveillance

  “Our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into our digital skins,” wrote J. D. Lasica in 1998. Since then, developments relating to online identity and privacy have progressively borne out his provocative assertion. Today, mass surveillance of our lives has become commonplace and endemic, leading to what Andrew Keen has described as a “catastrophe of abundance” of personal data.

  When Time named its 2006 Person of the Year as “You,” it was signaling a global trend toward deep integration of data and algorithmic culture into our lives with the rise of social media. On its front cover, a computer screen displaying the word “You” served as a reflective mirror. “Yes you,” the caption explains, “You control the Information Age,” and “you” are responsible for “founding and framing the new digital democracy.” The mirror symbolically captured the open-endedness of the Internet and its readiness to be filled with reflections of ourselves while the “you” defined this moment in terms of individual empowerment.

about

Professor Paul Arthur is Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Global Issues, at Edith Cowan University, Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on culture and identity to migration and human rights. His latest book is Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity (ed., 2018). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Paul Arthur has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. He has served on the executive boards and councils of the global Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO); centerNet—the worldwide network of digital research centres (Co-Chair, 2015–2019); the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA); the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (founding President 2011–2015, Vice-President 2018–2021); the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC); and the NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources) Super Science initiative of the Australian Government. Click here for full Profile.

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recent

• Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future
• Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage
• Migrant Nation
• Engaging Collections and Communities: Technology and Interactivity in Museums
• Digital Postmodernism and Postcolonialism
• Things Fall Apart: Identity in the Digital World
• Data Portraits: Identity, Privacy, and Surveillance
• Coda: Data Generation
• Material Memory and the Digital
• Private Lives, Intimate Readings

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