‘Datafication,’ Transparency, and good
governance of the data city
a
Alison POWELL a
London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract. It is easier than ever to collect data about all kinds of aspects of daily
life. This data can have significant value for the people who produce it, but also for
corporations and governments. This chapter investigates how this process of
‘datafication’ operates in the space of the city, where globalization and other
political-economic pressures have shifted the notion and practice of citizenship.
Through an investigation of the concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’ the
chapter highlights some significant shifts in the power relations related to data
collection and use, and identifies directions for future research and policy making
in this area. .
Keywords. Citizenship, openness, transparency, datafication
We experience technologies and artifacts as altering our pre-existing capabilities vis-a-vis
the physical world, but technologies and artifacts also mediate our embodied perception of
that world – of how it is organized and how it works. Because they are both tools for
producing useful results and tools for representing the world, networked communication
technologies shape our perceptions of reality more comprehensively than simpler artifacts do
[1], p. 199.
Introduction: The Data City
The practice of everyday life has the potential to generate enormous amounts of data.
These data both fit into a variety of systems of control, and provide the opportunity to
improve life for individuals. Increasingly, data mediate all kinds of activities:
movement, transaction, pollution, location. To illustrate: transport systems rely on
passenger and traffic data to centrally monitor and control the flows of people, vehicles,
and goods, as well as to inform passengers when the bus or train is due to arrive.
Mobile phone companies collect location data about mobile phones, and call and web
browsing data from the people who use them. Air quality monitors read particles in the
air, CCTV cameras record vast amounts of visual information, credit cards record
purchases, energy meters record – in real time – the use of electricity, and crimes are
mapped by police forces and presented to the public.
These data are retained and calculated by government and corporate entities, or
combined, analysed, repackaged and sold. New data analysis techniques as well as new
data generating media (including the sensor technology that comprises the ‘Internet of
Things’) extend the range of ways that data is produced, as well as the number of ways
it is understood, and thus the importance of accountability and governance of that data.
We are persistently promised by the promoters of these technologies that this
intensification of data gathering, especially in cities, will improve experiences of
everyday life. Keeping these promises depends on a number of assumptions about the
relationships between individuals, data, and governments. First, it depends on the
relationship constructed between individuals and institutions. Are governments
responding to the needs of citizens and creating public goods, or are they driven by the
demands of a market and the interests of consumers? Indeed, new commercial models
of data processing construct both governments and individuals as consumers. Second, it
depends on the significance of values such as openness and transparency. These values
promise better social outcomes through greater visibility of actions that might
previously have been concealed, but these values also establish different kinds of
power relations that are exercised, for example, in the indeterminacy of the value of
data, breaking down necessarily hierarchical relationships between powerful
surveillance and resistant ‘sousveillance’.
This chapter will assess the ethical and governance implications of the
intensification of data production, use and analysis, employing examples related to
everyday life and citizenship in cities. The city is chosen as the locus of examination
here because it is a site where citizenship has transformed as a result of globalization
[2] and where policies of openness and transparency have been advanced in concert
with efforts at reducing expenditure on public services. This notion of the ‘data city’
thus provides the framework for developing the concepts of openness, transparency and
datafication in this chapter. The chapter discusses these concepts to identify directions
for a future research agenda, and concludes with a reflection on future policy
considerations.
1. Citizenship, communication and datafication
Citizenship in rich Western countries appears to be increasingly knitted together by
access to and participation through networked communication. This has created a range
of situations in which citizenship, technological access and communications are
connected. Kevin Robins notes that under conditions of globalization, citizenship can
move from being understood in national terms of identification and identity, to being
more loosely explored through economic and cultural perspectives [3]. Building on
Robins’ work, Myria Georgiou identifies the relationship between this more expansive
citizenship and practices of communication: ‘the city is not only an experimental space,
but also a political space where struggles for power, control and ownership are
reflected and shaped through the intense (mediated) meetings of people, technologies
and places’ ([2], p.224). Communication, then, can be a key way that this broader mode
of citizenship is developed.
Describing situations where citizenship is exercised via communication, Darin
Barney highlights the fact that they are often ‘situations where the experience of
inequality and exclusion are acute, and where this coincides with a deficit of publicity –
whereby actionable information is scarce, communication is tightly controlled, and
participation denied or meaningless’ ([4], p. 79). In these situations, expectations about
communication and indeed participation take on the character of political demands, and
communicating becomes a form of political action. This is the case in places under
autocratic rule or where control of information is a form of political control: in
mainland China, where images of the Tianamen Square protest are routinely censored,
heavily encoded messages referring to the date of the protest, circulate as acts of
political opposition. This perspective underlines the significance of communication as a
means of establishing legitimacy within public and political space. Taken forward, it
also highlights the significance of information dissemination as a feature of political
engagement.
Communication is also perceived as short-circuiting political participation, as the
act of communication (especially via the production of data) comes to take on more
significance than the message it’s meant to carry. Jodi Dean argues that that the norms
of publicity – information, communication, and participation – have come to stand in
for the political ends that they were presumed to serve. In other words, the act of
communicating a message has come to stand in for the message itself. The message is
part of a data stream and its most important feature is its circulation. This formulation
of communication is important for considering citizenship in the data city. Dean’s
insight is that the fact of communicating a message, rather than the content of the
message itself, has become the most important action. She refers to a ‘communicative
capitalism’, which ‘designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as
central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies’
([5], p. 51). These values include access, inclusion, discussion and participation – in
other words, the foundations of expectations of openness and transparency. They are
realized through the expansion, intensification and interconnection of global
telecommunications.
In political terms, this has led to a situation in which publicity drives politics.
Dean’s work relates to the process of what Josée van Dijk calls ‘datafication’, a
‘secular belief’ in the value of data as a fundamental means to understand the world.
Datafication valorizes the results of data analytics as key means of understanding
society. Van Dijk writes, ‘datafication as a legitimate means to access, understand and
monitor people’s behaviour is becoming a leading principle, not just amongst technoadepts, but also amongst scholars who see datafication as a revolutionary research
opportunity to investigate human conduct.’ ([6], p. 198). Within a culture that valorizes
communication for its own sake, it is quite acceptable to share status updates, check-ins
and other location-based and personal data. Sharing this information validates the
existence of the person producing it. In combination, such information can be used to
build up a narrative of personal experience that can be presented to others without
additional commentary. More extensive data collection affords this communication for
communication’s sake. In addition, this information is also collected and analysed by
governments and corporate actors, contributing to optimized experiences on the part of
the individual as well as optimized analytics for providers of services, whether public
or corporate entities.
In the data city, the benefits of unconscious and indeterminate data collection are
things like energy reduction, responsive interior environments (and, in a world with
uncertain environmental outcomes, perhaps also exterior environments), seamless
communication and easier transactions. Yet these benefits do not accrue unless
collected data are analysed and mined. This analysis and mining requires significant
financial and calculative resources [7] that are often found within private organizations
able to leverage the appropriate resources, including data storage, calculation, and
packaging of analytics. This in turn means that computation and analysis technologies
do have politics, as they are constructed by particular actors and made to function in
particular ways [8].
1.1. Repositioning Citizenship
The move towards datafication occurs at the same time as a shift in the notion of
citizenship. In a representative democracy, citizenship has rights and duties: the right to
vote, work and live somewhere, and the responsibility to pay tax, obey the law (and
presumably to vote). In many contemporary data cities, residents may not have official
status as national citizens, but they may possess a de facto citizenship based on their
participation in cultural life or formal and informal labour markets. This is one way of
defining citizenship from the perspective of the citizen. In an expanded form, this also
encompasses the notion of being a ‘good citizen’, and the opportunity to express this
kind of belonging through creative acts.
From the point of view of a government, pressure to roll back the state sets up a
new kind of perspective on citizenship that shifts from seeing citizens as those with
civic responsibilities and engagements, to classifying them as consumers who purchase
services from providers. Datafication often appears to promise greater efficiency in the
delivery of services, since information can be obtained at the point where these services
are delivered: for example, a sensor on a rubbish bin ensures it is emptied only when
full, which might facilitate more efficient refuse collection.
A consumer perspective on citizenship transforms the relationship between
government, individuals and corporate entities. In a data city, this transformed
relationship is evidenced by production, exchange, and brokerage of data. Citizens can
become consumer-producers of data, creating value for governments and for the
companies that provide brokerage of that data. Governments too become consumers, of
analytics that help them to rationally manage resources that are deemed scarce. This
situation invites participation from brokers who can negotiate the relationships between
these two entities, positioning them both as consumers, but of different packages of
analytic data.
To illustrate, consider an example of data brokerage around an everyday urban
activity. The commuter application Urban Engines acts as a data intermediary and also
promises ‘optimization’ of data for both governments and individuals. Individual
commuters agree to have their commuting measured through a GPS enabled
application, and in exchange are notified of ways to better optimize (i.e. reduce) their
commuting time, perhaps by setting off earlier or using a route that the application
determines has fewer people using it. The application ‘provides rewards for small
changes to commuting times that reduce congestion’ (https://www.urbanengines.com/).
At the same time that personalized recommendations are available to individual
commuters who use the service, aggregate analytics based on the data of many
commuters are provided to cities, offering the transport authority an opportunity to
employ ‘micro-targeting’ of commuters to encourage specific types of behaviour.
This exemplifies a kind of coercive orientation towards citizenship: people must be
provided with incentives in order to behave in a way that generates collective benefits;
furthermore, collective benefit is associated with any optimization of a system where
the most use can be made from the smallest possible investment. This is citizenship in a
straitened age, away from the responsibility of cradle to grave welfare, or where the
discourse of authority insists on presenting public services in terms of value for money.
This consumer perspective on citizenship combines with the ethos of datafication to
result in a situation where citizen participation in improving a public service takes the
form of collecting and sharing personal data. The mode of citizenship is not altruistic,
nor is it based on responsibility; instead, it is based on the notion of exchange, where
personal data is exchanged for information intended to optimize an individual’s
experience. In turn, that optimization is meant to lead to a change in behaviour that is
itself measurable, and hence valuable to the city government.
This entire datafied relationship is meant to be ‘open’ – that is, it is meant to
operate within a system accessible to many players – and ‘transparent’ in that its
function can be visible or known. There is not space in this short chapter to elucidate
the relationship between these concepts, but the sections below identify that they are
related and that they significantly influence the experience of citizenship in the data
city. The next sections outline some features of the relationship between these concepts
that open opportunities for future research.
2. Ideologies of openness
Openness is a broad term that can refer, in general, to the possibility of participating in
a process, especially a process of governance. In the context of data cities, openness is
also a quality of the (technical) data gathering systems, and the participation they
permit or invite, through technical as well as other modes of governance. Nathaniel
Tkacz traces the emergence of open governance ideologies from the software cultures
of the 1980s through more recent network cultures. He notes that from its beginnings in
the philosophy of free and open software, which decried closure of source code, two
competing ideologies emerged: one interpretation grounded in the free software
movement that perceived the opposite of ‘open’ as being proprietary (see [9]) and
another where openness is primarily concerned with the mode of software production.
Over time these ideas have been translated into new situations that conceive openness a
new way of addressing issues of participation, management of knowledge and political
legitimacy. Notions of openness have shifted from being pragmatic suggestions about
the sharing of code to being political or moral positions suggesting openness as a key to
a better society [10]. This moral position can indeed have paradoxical consequences, as
illustrated by responses to revelations of large-scale surveillance by the NSA and other
intelligence agencies.
This is an inherently paradoxical enterprise: the mere rhetoric of openness implies
that something is wrong with ‘enclosure’. It often manifests, as in Douglas Rushkoff’s
work, as a politics entirely grounded in computational metaphors, valorizing the notion
that legislative decision making, like code, should be completely visible to anyone
acting outside of it. This notion has not only driven the interest in opening data, but has
also underpinned proposals that align greater governmental legitimacy with increased
online engagement and the participation of individuals in government decisions. In a
highly developed form, this ‘liquid democracy’ has formed the basis of attempts by the
German Pirate Party to establish a system of rapid and continual consultation, called
‘liquid feedback’, that allows any party member to propose a policy, and also positions
opportunities for participation at any point along a sliding scale from direct to
representative democracy.
In reality, the paradoxical aim at openness is unresolved, both in conceptual and
technical terms. The opposite of such open endeavours is not the enclosure of data and
information, but in fact the exhaustion of its legitimacy. In the case of ‘liquid
democracy’, the 2012 German Pirate party convention was encumbered with more than
1,400 pages and 700 initiatives gathered from online consultation [11]. Furthermore,
the party struggled with the legitimacy of these suggestions, given that only a very
small minority of people actually participated in online liquid feedback processes. In
other areas too the differential politics of access and participation in open systems have
challenged their legitimacy [12]. While governments do provide access to publicly
collected data sets, these are often stored in formats such as PDF that cannot be
usefully analysed or repurposed. Even open data sets in full reusable form need to be
analysed by people with appropriate technical knowledge – a situation that is not
necessarily broadly democratic, but instead characterized by the logic of expert
participation in ‘open’ technical development [13].
Openness thus retains a promise of legitimacy and accountability while precluding
the kinds of access and representation that democratic citizenship might require. As
Barney writes, ‘we are well prepared to live with the contradiction between the
ideological promotion of “openness” and its ongoing material denial ([4], p. 73)’ Legal
theorist Julie Cohen identifies how commitments to openness do not necessarily
undermine regimes of secrecy on the part of technology companies, nor do they make
data gathering practices more evident to the people subjected to them. As she writes,
‘the power of the ideology of openness operates to conceal the extent to which
technical secrecy is reinforced by law. Regimes of technical secrecy derive additional
force from moral panics that cast restrictions on access as a matter of social and
cultural survival, and from processes of technical mystification that position decisions
about network architecture as purely technical matters best handled by expert elites’
([1], p.208). Given the impossibility of fulfilling the promise of openness, a common
response is to position openness as something accessible only to those with special
capabilities. The promise of openness is hard to fulfil unless one can gain access to
these capabilities: government agencies can open up their data stores to public use
through open data projects like the UK’s data.gov.uk, but the re-use of this data may be
limited by access to facilities and expertise, making it more difficult for community
organizations and individuals to benefit. Regardless of these drawbacks, calls for
openness continue, along with evocations of the importance of transparency.
3. Promises of Transparency
Principles of transparency most often relate to the transparency of government
decisions, but as data-intense practices and their related cultural values expand, citizens
and consumers are expected to be more transparent. Transparency creates a perceived
legitimacy to a process by revealing information that allows its quality to be judged. In
recent years, pressure has increased on governments to become increasingly transparent
and accountable to their citizens. This has occurred in concert with the expansion of
online tools used for collaboration, including but not limited to websites that encourage
comments, collectively editable documents, and social networking platforms that solicit
and record conversation and deliberation. As a result, governments are increasingly
engaged in soliciting participation from citizens in various ways, including online
consultations on new policies and laws, open consultation processes that take place
both online and within geographic communities, citizen voting on government
initiatives and ‘citizen-sourcing’ as pushed by the Obama administration in the Open
Government Directive in the United States.
Since datafication produces both subjects who generate data and clients who
consume it, notions of transparency as a baseline value for governance cut in several
directions. A cultural expansion of interest in transparency has meant that all kinds of
actions are now expected to be rendered visible as a result of the fact that it is possible
to collect data about them. This can create both dynamics of data surveillance, where
powerful entities consolidate power by observing the less powerful, as well as data
sousveillance, where less powerful entities employ data collection and transparency to
hold more powerful entities (often governments) to account. The dynamic of
sousveillance has driven many efforts at creating and expanding transparency. What
began with efforts to create accountability for public spending by publishing ‘sunshine
lists’ of public sector workers with salaries above a certain level has expanded as more
data – collected both by the public sector and by others – has become available.
Corporate and government transparency has promised access to policies and procedures.
Open government data projects promise to share data collected using public funds. Yet
as ideologies of openness take hold, transparency becomes not just a virtue but an
obligation – one that can be deployed in a coercive manner. The ways that transparency
is coerced (and by whom) are revealing of the power of this ethic.
Arguably, WikiLeaks disrupted the legitimacy of non-transparent processes of
diplomacy by enforcing transparency with the publication of the diplomatic cables
series [14]. The more shadowy figures of Anonymous [15] also attempt to enforce
transparency on individuals and organizations whose actions or politics Anons disagree
with. Culturally, social media enforces a kind of transparency on individuals who feel
compelled to share appropriate types of details about their lives in a play of personal
branding [16]. Finally, mass surveillance enforces transparency on individuals, which
shifts power relations such that the least powerful in society become those who have
nothing to ‘show’. They are the people who cannot demonstrate a ‘paper trail’ – the
poor, the less technically adept or the disinterested. In the absence of ‘acceptable’
traces of their existence (particularly traces that cannot easily be monetized or that
indicate complexity in their relation to the state) may have more to fear than those who
are outwardly or ‘appropriately’ transparent. The paradoxical thing about this is that
those who have the most power are those who can engage in steganography – hiding in
plain sight by being very transparent. This forms part of the public relations strategy in
which an entity carefully admits to wrongdoing in order to control the public debate – a
strategy often employed in the case of oil spills or other industrial accidents.
The dynamics of communicative capitalism and datafication complicate these bidirectional acts of enforced transparency. Data production (and collection) is
increasingly dynamic and social, with many benefits constructed as flowing from the
sharing of data. This changes the power dynamic from one where surveillance from
above is countered by sousveillance from below, to one where data production, as well
as benefit from data analytics, occur consistently and are directed to a variety of
recipients. This suggests relationships of greater indeterminacy than the power
relationships reinforced or critiqued in the surveillance/sousveillance dynamic. In these
situations, transparency and openness are not sufficient to reveal the dynamics of
power that can develop within datafication, nor the long and complex journeys that
data may take [17]. Thus, decisions about how to enact good governance in the data
city can no longer strive only to insulate the individual from the incursion of
surveillance, but also to understand the implications of the intersection of datafication,
communicative capitalism and ideologies of openness and transparency.
4. Implications
Shifts in the nature of citizenship, and the rise of values such as openness and
transparency, have shaped the experience of the data city. Under the logic of
communicative capitalism, participation, openness and transparency have accompanied
an expansion in information communicated and an intensification of the ways
information is used to develop consumer products meant to benefit both individuals
and city governments. The ideology of openness drives an expectation that sharing
such information represents a contribution to a public good, while transparency rules
heighten the sense that the normal state of politics involves continual disclosure. This
combination of things creates the baseline for a data city of perpetual disclosure, where
optimizations for both governments and individuals stem from the analysis of data and
its re-presentation as a consumer product. The brief example of the function and model
of Urban Engines illustrates this dynamic, and the sketch of the concepts highlights
aspects that could be developed in future research.
Any future investigation must consider whether and how things could be different.
Is it possible to consider the process of data analysis differently, and hence to capture
an alternative modality within communicative capitalism? Nick Couldry identifies how
citizens might conduct ‘social analytics’ of data to derive different sets of meaning or
create different propositions of value [18]. This proposition depends on a figuring of
citizenship more in line with Barney’s notion of communicative citizenship: under
situations where data analysis is obscured from public view, perhaps a civic orientation
towards analysis could recapture the communicative potential of data and develop a
citizenship that positions individuals, groups and governments differently.
Another example of a brokering arrangement within the data city helps to
investigate this proposition. Cyclestreets, a non-profit organization that develops
cycling maps based on contributions from individual cyclists, has recently launched a
local mapping, trip planning and problem reporting application in Hackney, a London
borough with a very high level of cycling [19]. The app collects data from the GPS
function of cyclists’ mobile phones and provides this, along with information on the
purpose of the trip and basic demographics, to Hackney Council. Like the transport
providers who might use the Urban Engines system, local government in Hackney
needs information about how their cycling infrastructure is being used. Individual
cyclists who use their bikes primarily for utility journeys such as getting to work may
also want to use the app to record times, distances and calories burned.
As a non-profit organization, Cyclestreets occupies a different position to a profitmaking data broker such as Urban Engines. Cyclestreets uses the open source Open
Street Map as the basis for its cycling maps, which are developed by cyclists
themselves. The application developers employed by Cyclestreets for its projects are
techno-savvy intermediaries able to employ free software and open data as materials
for the production of a device that collects further data from individual cyclists. These
journeys can be shared, helping Hackney Council to identify heavily used cycling
routes in the borough. The app allows people to upload reports of problems they have
encountered in their daily journeys, including photographs and descriptions. This
information is added to the local collaborative maps available through the Cyclestreets
website, and is available for analysis by Hackney council. Cyclestreets writes the
application, but does not analyse the data.
To what extent does Cyclestreets present a different form of datafication? Cyclists
using the app are consciously contributing to a shared resource (the local cycling maps
that are built up using submitted data) and employing the app as an intermediary to
report problems to their local government, who will presumably act on this information
to improve cycling infrastructure. Local government, in turn, gains access to
information about the practices of cyclists, whose movements cannot otherwise be
monitored.
This application is developed from open-source technical tools and creates a
relatively direct means for citizens to share data with government, via problem
reporting and sharing of chosen cycle journeys. The app is free to download, and
Cyclestreets does not benefit financially from its use. However, it also relies on the
logic of datafication, both in terms of the cyclist’s ideal knowledge of their own cycling
behaviour and in terms of the borough’s decision-making: the data from the app
legitimates some decisions about cycling infrastructure development and perhaps limits
others. Indeed, a small number of enthusiastic contributors of data via the app could
provide greater visibility to some reported problems rather than others, much as the
enthusiastic contributors to the Pirate Party’s liquid democracy platforms distorted the
potential for democratic participation. Non-profit intermediaries are necessary for the
development of voice in a data city, but they may not be sufficient.
Under the logic of datafication, phenomena for which data can be produced or
analysed become more apparent than other phenomena. Producing data from a different
viewpoint (as Cyclestreets does) can intervene in this logic to a certain extent, but it
remains to be seen how we might think more expansively about these processes. One
possibility might be to further develop ‘citizen analytics’ where non-profits analyse
data as a way of presenting alternative narratives or relationships, and another might be
to visualize some of the datafication processes as they occur – a provocation behind the
development by Bill
Gaver and his Interaction Research Studio
(http://www.gold.ac.uk/interaction/) of an artistic prototype that represents all of the
ambient data being produced around, and by, an individual.
5. Conclusion
This chapter has explored how ideologies of openness and transparency intersect with
changes in the notion of citizenship, particularly within the experience of
communicative capitalism. The data city permits optimization. It invites the brokerage
of data and creates space for corporate intermediaries to conduct this brokerage for
profit, although there are also spaces for ‘social analytics’ and non-profit brokerage.
But it remains that the data city is predicated on the value of communication and the
importance of data as a commodity, within an extension of communicative capitalism.
Dean’s original critique of this idea focuses on the damage communicative capitalism
does to democracy, and the danger that the ‘spectacle of communicating’ poses in
potentially reducing politics to a primarily economic form [5]. From this perspective it
is easy to see the risks that the dynamic of datafication poses.
Policy and political responses must take this critique into account. Under these
circumstances it is no longer useful to look for examples of domination and resistance
in data collection and analysis. Data flows no matter what. Instead, we could think
carefully about how those data move, where they end up, and who brokers their path.
We could consider ways of establishing trust and legitimacy for the data that
increasingly identifies our place in the world, and acknowledging the power
differentials that underlie the production of some kinds of data or others. We could
seriously address the kinds of political consequences of the enforcement of
transparency on the public. None of this will be straightforward. Research and policy
work will need to be conscious of these new dynamics of power, sensitive in their
critique and brave in their recommendations.
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