11.2. REPAIR Dialogues with Antti Kurko
PhD Researcher Antti Kurko (Tampere University) will deliver an online presentation titled Digital Waste: A Lens to Study Datafied Society on February 11, from 9:00 to 10:00 (EET).
Attend the session via Zoom: https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/62060674500?pwd=aFln1p92lGUFeUoqemak1o3N6AIFhC.1
REPAIR Dialogues is a venue for scholars and collaborators of the REPAIR project to present their ongoing work and findings in a less formal manner. Each event includes a brief 15–30 minute introduction by a researcher or expert, followed by a joint discussion. The events are held online (via Zoom) in English.
Digital Waste: A Lens to Study Datafied Society
The talk is based on upcoming article that draws upon critical data studies and social scientific waste studies. The article aims to conceptualize digital waste by examining what different waste concepts emerge from the existing research about digital waste, and how this broad concept can be used as a social scientific lens to observe datafication, data practices and data-driven infrastructures.
In the field of social sciences, waste has been used as a lens to explore society from different angles. Waste itself can be understood in diverse ways, and as human beings we cannot completely avoid it. It constantly disturbs and reminds us of its existence. We cannot get rid of its haunting presence even in a digital world.
The study casts critical insights into the dominant approaches towards data gathering and data economy. Instead of understanding data as valuable, eternal, and immaterial resource, the concept of digital waste highlights data through the questions of materiality, distraction, excess, uselessness and disorder.
Rather than viewing digital waste as purely material or immaterial phenomena, I suggest that it should be understood as a mixture of cultural elements, matter and meanings, human and non-human, and where its relation to society is as important as its relation to nature. Its condition leans strongly into other materialities through infrastructural entanglements and thus it cannot be unattached from other forms of waste such as mining waste or e-waste. Digital waste actively avoids dichotomic separations of material/immaterial and physical/virtual, which underlines its nature as hybrid and ubiquitous object.
Antti Kurko is a PhD Researcher in Media Studies at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Studies (ITC) at Tampere University. In his dissertation he studies ontology of digital waste and data materialities.