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

Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. His forthcoming book is Open Scholarship in the Humanities (2023, with Lydia Hearn). From 2016–21 he was director of the Edith Cowan Centre for Global Issues, and in 2021–2022 leader of ECU’s university-wide Society and Culture research theme. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, and has given over one hundred keynote, plenary and invited talks in more than twenty countries. Click here for full Profile

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recent

• Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging
• 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
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• Things Fall Apart: Identity in the Digital World
• Data Portraits: Identity, Privacy, and Surveillance
• Coda: Data Generation
• Material Memory and the Digital

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