This week, I was reminded of not only the complex implications of media’s contextuality, but also the inherent difficulties associated with adapting the existing regulatory landscape to fit our shifting conceptual understanding of the link between data and personhood. As our fantastic guest lecturer, Kimberly Hassle, elucidated on Thursday, digital anthropology is defined by “its continuous questioning of pre-existing dichotomies”. After our six-week long interrogation of the distinction between representation and reality, I found this description to be a succinct encapsulation of the inherent liminality of media and how ethnography is uniquely equipped to navigate and interpret these eroding boundaries. In other words, media is a mediation, situated on the border of representation and reality, the digital and physical, and the public and private. In many ways, Ms. Hassle’s statement represents an important conceptual step forward by framing media as the center of a techno-cultural nexus, not just a footnote implicated in the more general production of culture. Thus, instead of focusing our analysis merely on the contextual influences imbued in the content of the message and the extent to which it is distorted, it is also important to consider how the structure of the media itself shapes the message and its communication in less overt ways through a Foucauldian limitation of the involved parties’  conceptual possibilities. Whether it’s by restricting the exposure afforded to certain topics or incentivizing both negative and positive engagement, digital platforms, especially social networking often employ different tactics to assert subliminal control over its users, delimiting the rules and social norms that govern the digital realm. As Professor Himpele touched on, it is only through the contextualization of the media that we can begin to deconstruct these conceptual schemas influencing our interpretation of public discourse.

With that said, I’d like to briefly turn to Ruckenstien and Dow Schull (2017)’s “pixelated person” and the challenges related to the delineation of a privacy threshold.  After some deliberation, I’ve come to the realization that the threshold dictating how much data constitutes a person is probably much lower than I previously conceptualized. As we’ve discussed in previous weeks, authenticity is fallacy and most representations are merely attempting to portray a non-existent or severely altered reality. With the idea of a true reality called into question, your digital representations, the vestiges of self you leave in your wake as you navigate the Internet, in a way become your real identity. This would lend itself to a pro-regulation argument, encouraging governmental intervention in cases of corporate surveillance by emphasizing the exploitive aspects of data mining. Enforcement, however, is a separate, and far more daunting, issue. The Internet is an untamable, organic, and adaptive organism and human ingenuity enabled by technologization will always be able undermine laws implemented by regulatory bodies dependent on a lethargic legislative process. In light of this obstacle, I am not convinced that there is a perfect solution. That said, the first step towards the expansion and protection of individual privacy rights is to increase awareness in order to promote a sense of urgency. Thus, the complexities discussed in this post are all important considerations for us to keep in mind as we attempt to analyze datafication as a social phenomenon and further uncover media’s role in the production of culture. See you all next week!