The current quest to understand the digital society is populated by a plethora of ideas, ranging from catchwords to concepts. This special section establishes a forum to reflect if these are actually worthwhile, provide analytic value and describe something new.
Datafication is a key concept of digital society referring to the quantification and, often, monetisation of human life through digital information.
Concepts such as ‘filter bubble’ enjoy considerable popularity in scholarly as well as mainstream debates, but are rarely defined with any rigour. This has led to highly contradictory research findings. This article provides a critical review of the ‘filter bubble’ idea, and concludes that its persistence has served only to distract scholarly attention from far more critical areas of enquiry.
What is platformisation? This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms it develops a comprehensive approach to this process.
Algorithmic governance as a key concept in controversies around the emerging digital society takes up the idea that digital technologies produce social ordering in a specific way.
Information and communication technologies allow tax administrations to gather and process large amounts of data in order to individuate tax evaders. However, how to strike a balance between privacy rights and tax compliance?
Ad archives are a novel tool in online advertising governance. They promise significant benefits, but only if their operators address key criticisms.
This special issue brings together the best policy-oriented papers presented at the 2018 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in Montréal, Canada.
This paper is part of Transnational materialities, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. Introduction Questions about how data is generated, collected and used have taken hold of public imagination in recent years, not least in relation to government. While the collection of data about populations has always been central to practices of governance, the digital era has placed increased emphasis on the politics of data in state-citizen relations and contemporary power dynamics. In part a continuation of long-standing processes of bureaucratisation, the turn to data-centric practices in government across Western democracies emerges out of …
Datafication (the quantification of social life) is a colonial move which perpetuates a legacy of appropriation. But how to regulate this?