Where is the ‘struggle’ in communications for social progress?

Datafied media and society – Understanding the movement from mediation to constitution

The connection between the mediation of everyday life by the digital and the social embedding of digital media is a necessary starting point in contemplating ideas of social progress. As the digital pervades social processes, everyday social environments and the human body, communication infrastructure becomes more and more unnoticed. Social antecedents and actions of human beings are recorded, verified, identified, categorized as well as ‘reinscribed’ (Nayar, 2014), as they pass through information–communication networks and ambient digital intelligence inconspicuously.

Not only is the surveillance machinery watching the human body, it is also remaking it in datafied terms. As a collectivity, therefore, human society is crossing over to a cyborgian existence. The data apparatus also shapes human behaviour on a society-wide scale. Big Data analytics have recrafted neo-liberalism, reshaping architectures of social interaction through the ‘hypernudge’ (Yeung, 2016), thus redefining choice in highly subversive ways. Behavioural economics, counting on data sciences, positions the market as a site of truth, producing homo economicus (the economic human) and diffusing this mode of economic subjectivity across the social terrain (McMahon, 2015).

Yet already, writing in 1958, Hannah Arendt predicted in The Human Condition the despotic and dehumanizing fall-outs for public, social life, in the ‘mathematical treatment of reality’ (Arendt, 1998). She foresaw the depoliticization of the public realm that the science of individual behaviour effects, with its ‘great numbers, accounting for conformism, and automatism in human affairs’. In these times of Big Data, Arendt’s thesis comes alive yet again. However, and rather strangely, the global project of sustainable development seems to be unhinged from the narratives of data. The mainstream discourse on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) enunciates an idealistic view of a shared, technosocial future, ignoring the real-life contradictions of contemporary information–communication structures. ¹

As the networks of communication become the basis of a new economic logic feeding on human interaction and social behaviour, they create new cartographies of capitalism. Data and digital intelligence are already restructuring global markets in agriculture, health, financial services, retail, trade and commerce. The desire to control ‘data capital’ is powering mergers in all sectors.

Ideas of social progress hence need to contend with the data question – the configuration in law and policy of the ‘data subject’ as well as the treatment of data, arising from personal information and social interaction. In data debates, the data subject’s rights are often misunderstood to imply some kind of alienable property right over her personal data or information. This approach, based on possessive individualism, adopting market frameworks, is antithetical to a clearer understanding of the social roots of individual privacy and the inalienability of personal information (Rouvroy and Poullet, 2009). Individual consent frameworks for data cannot fix the problem of depoliticization of the public realm resulting from the rise of the individualized data subject and the expropriation of data for private gain.

Chapter 13 recommends the ‘regulation of algorithms’ and encourages citizens to demand ‘transparency and accountability in respect of data collection, filtering and use of predictive algorithms’, but does not reflect adequately on data ownership itself. Ownership regimes for data need to be based on the Arendtian ideal of the public sphere and concerns for privacy that are essentially social, that is, the value it has for human creativity and flourishing and for a vibrant democracy. Today, corporations freely collect and process data about the social, physical and natural environment to build granular digital intelligence that they own. Such proprietization – especially of social interactions data – is questionable. While private ownership of data per se may be legitimate, social advancement depends on a commons-based governance regime for social data. The potential of information and communications technology and global interconnectedness to accelerate human progress, identified in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN General Assembly, 2015), depends on the deployment of personal and social data for public good, with safeguards against abuse of such data and guarantees to ensure data subjects’ right to privacy and freedom from harm. Calls for ‘data driven’ decision-making and global collaborations using Big Data seem to further simplistic formulations of win–win partnerships in development that obscure grievous violations of privacy (Taylor, 2017).

A commons-based ownership framework for data can also recentre local and cultural autonomy in respect of the communications sphere, presenting possibilities to reimagine and invent local meanings around the global digital communications infrastructure. This is not to fetishize the local, but to reassert the possibilities for plurality that the Internet can make real.

Communicative citizenship in digital times – The conundrum of voice without agency

Chapter 13 observes how despite the uneven distribution of opportunities to access and use media, on balance, more people now are able to make meaning and be connected through media. This pointer to the essential paradox of our public sphere needs more unpacking. What does a lack of opportunity to be a user mean? How is voice getting transformed through new associations and solidarities? How is knowledge created, legitimated and controlled in the emerging public sphere?

The diffusion of the Internet has much to do with the opportunity structure to participate in the public sphere. In the 48 poorest countries, Internet growth rates are slowing down despite 85 per cent of the population being still offline. A sizable proportion of this population is poor, less educated and located in rural and remote areas, and the majority are women (Broadband Commission, 2016). In addition, the majority of people for whom broadband is unaffordable live not in the poorest countries, but in larger (lower) middle-income countries with high income inequality, such as China, India and Brazil (Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2013). The poor in these countries remain underserved because of seemingly weak demand, giving network operators limited incentive to invest in these markets. The intertwining of non-availability and poor demand leads to an ‘access trap’, because of which a huge proportion of the world’s population are simply not online.

Access to media resources is a foundational dimension of citizenship in the digital age. Also, to be informed, to inform, connect, organize and mobilize, social movements today require digital capabilities, including a visible presence on media platforms. However, the mainstream digital media ecosystem poses challenges in this regard. Websites take recourse to algorithmic manipulations for revenue generation. Digital corporations also use algorithms to push hyper-personalized news results to users. Social media has given users the comfort to seek others who think like themselves. The extreme polarization of the public sphere means there is no middle space. The human condition under digital capitalism seems to be condemned to fragmented non-publics, the cocoons of solace from where we express views without fear of social criticism – what Timur Kuran, in his Private Truths, Public Lies called the ‘preference cascade’ (Kuran, 1995). The degeneration of social media as a site for vicious hate speech and rumour-mongering arises in this loss of the middle space. Under the circumstances, news that is not eyeball worthy or news for polite society is no news. The truth, as told by socially underrepresented groups – even if they had access to digital tools – is likely to dissolve into cyberspace, unseen and unheard.

For marginal post-colonial citizen subjects, citizenship is a process of continuing assertions of legitimacy and claims-making around ways of knowing, being and doing, which, however, are not admitted in the mainstream as valid. The marginal subject in the public–political sphere is struggling not so much to be included, but to demand ‘cognitive justice’, that is, to have the chance to contest dominant knowledge and find place for her world view (Visvanathan, 2009).

New publics emerging through the Internet do have new repertoires of action. Many are also drawing from, and contributing to, emergent cultures around civic information and intelligence. Yet the far-reaching changes to social interconnection are not necessarily deepening democracy from the standpoint of cognitive justice. Being able to voice, but without agency, and being able to participate, without a political public sphere, implies the relegation of those whose truths and realities don’t matter into a non-space that semantic structures of the digital do not recognize.

Although the Internet is a potent force for the non-rivalrous dissemination of information, the neo-liberalization of the information society has seen large-scale control of information and knowledge by corporations. Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Technology Protection Measures (TPM) are used to lock up copyrighted content on the Internet. These measures have become commonplace in copyright law after the two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Internet treaties ² and assume a maximalist stance that fails to recognize the need for differential access (Gurumurthy et al., 2018). The promise of the Internet for equalizing access to knowledge is thus held to ransom through such techno-controls that prevent the majority of the global South from participating in the knowledge society and economy.

The orchestration by capitalism of what is heard and seen and the problematic confluence of enhanced individual agency and parochial solidarities undermine a pluralistic vision of citizenship. Indeed, these sites of contemporary capital are not impregnable and do become sites for resistance movements – as various points in Chapter 13 reveal.

The rise of civic identity and the space of media flows have worked to challenge knowledge barriers and destabilize traditional social hierarchies. As noted in Section 5 of Chapter 13, this ‘new political cosmopolitanism among youth’ ³ provides the much-needed glimmer of hope for new futures. But equally true is the rise of citizens who believe that to ‘hack’ politics is a far more attractive option than being involved in traditional politics (Gurumurthy et al., 2017b). Acknowledging the need to revitalize democratic institutions globally, nationally and locally, the impatience and distrust of youth in democracy presents a political challenge for reinventing institutions adequate to citizenship in digital globalism. New forms of solidarity also need to be understood if the affordances of digital technologies are actually to support networking. The ‘natural’ tendency for interconnection offered by the Internet in digital society must not be confused with the norms and institutions needed for a rebooted right to assembly and collective action.

Unfortunately, the world over, the tyranny of state power seems to find a new lease of life, as the rule of law sits uncomfortably with the anachronism of pre-Internet institutions. This is especially true for the Global South. On one hand, state institutions and systems are being reshaped through the digital. On the other hand, lack of access and disparate levels of techno-capabilities impede citizenship for the majority. One thing often forgotten in the discourse on access is the opportunity cost of participation in digital democracy for the most marginalized. Relearning everyday practices of ‘voicing’ in relation to powerful state actors is an uphill task, requiring a new civic compass to navigate the digital terrain and time and money that the poor can ill afford (Gurumurthy et al., 2017a). It is in this context that the purported openness and inclusion of digital systems need to be unpacked.

The findings of IT for Change’s multi-country research study on voice and citizenship (Gurumurthy et al., 2017b) illuminate the key issues for political communication in the digital age:

The discourse and practice of democracy in the digital age need to be evaluated for its silences on citizen accountability. The evocative rhetoric of openness and transparency associated with technological protocols drive governance toward a depoliticized, expert-based architecture, far removed from the fundamental principles and practices of democracy.

This is true not only in relation to national democracy but the governance frameworks of the digital on a global scale as well. Critiquing the elevation of ‘multistakeholderism’ (MSism) as a common-sense model of governance of the Internet, Michael Gurstein astutely observes how this masks the dominance of business interests in the decision-making process:

[…] the governance notion implicit in MSism is one where governance is by and for those with a ‘stake’ in the governance decision thus shifting the basis of governance from one based on people and (at least indirectly) citizenship or participation in the broad community of the governed to one based on ‘stakes’ i.e. an ‘interest’ in the domain to which the governance apparatus is being applied. The historical notion of ‘stake’ in a context such as this one generally refers to a financial or ownership interest in the area under discussion but in the evolving Internet Governance sphere (and others) this has been extended to include a ‘technical stake’ (as in a professional interest) or even a ‘normative stake’ as in ensuring an outcome which is consistent with one’s values or norms. What is not included in any of the conventional approaches to MSism however, are broad notions of democratic participation (or accountability) i.e. where the governance is structured so as to include for example, those without a ‘direct’ stake in the outcomes but who nevertheless might as a consequence of their simple humanity be understood to be impacted by the decisions being taken. (Gurstein, 2014)

When the stakes pertain to the mobilization of communities and their everyday socio-cultural spaces, digital behemoths have shown that they can go all out. Data extractivism is the big game and data wars may not be far behind (Kilic and Avila, 2017). Rebuking Facebook for its aggressive lobbying and manipulative propaganda on Free Basics in 2016, the Indian telecom regulator delivered a scathing indictment (Srivas, 2016), accusing the company of converting the regulator’s consultation process into a ‘crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll’ and wilfully disregarding the regulator’s request to better inform Facebook’s users.

A concluding thought

Quite obviously, definitions of social progress cannot ignore communication rights. But the substance of such a definition must be predicated upon the right to cultural autonomy and cognitive justice as core to human advancement and social transformation. This not only implies the freedom for cultural expression but also the conditions that promote ‘access’ as the necessary basis for a community to produce and reproduce itself as a social, cultural, economic and political work of its own. The pathway to cognitive justice must embrace such a transformed idea of communication rights; ‘promoting access for content creation’ is unlikely to lead to such transformation.

The 21st century needs a media ecosystem that can ground individuals and communities in the socio-material links that make datafied futures radically different for those currently disenfranchised. We need to get there before the ‘access for data’ regime reaches the still-to-be-connected.