All Welcome
Department of Culture, Film and Media
University of Nottingham
Research Lectures 2014/15
Professor Helen Kennedy (University of Sheffield)
WHAT SHOULD CONCERN US ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA DATA MINING?
5.00pm Wednesday 18 March 2015
University of Nottingham
University Park Campus
B40 Trent Building (for directions, see below)
New methods for analysing social media data promise significant new ways of knowing. At the same time, critics warn of a number of problems with social media data mining: access is uneven, methods provide a new means of surveillance and control, and they are used to accumulate knowledge about consumers in an increasingly ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift 2005). These criticisms are entirely justified when it comes to the spectacular forms of data mining that have hit the headlines in recent years. However, there are many more forms of data mining than these: diverse social media data mining practices, carried out by a variety of actors, in distinct contexts, for distinct purposes (some of them more troubling than others) are proliferating. So we need to differentiate types of data mining, actors engaged in such practices, institutional and organisational contexts in which data mining takes place, and the range of purposes, intentions and consequences of data mining (van Dijck and Poell 2013). To date, academic attention has largely focused on the data mining of the mega social media platforms, governments and security agencies: now we need to ground the study of data mining in real-world, everyday, ’ordinary’ practices and contexts (Couldry and Powell, 2014).
This paper focuses on some of the emerging, ordinary practices and actors engaged in social media data mining. It asks what kinds of social media data mining should concern us and what should concern us about them. It concludes by reflecting on whether humans must ‘submit to the harsh logic of machinery’ (Feenberg, 2002), whether social media data mining always inevitably suppresses human well-being, or if other alternatives are possible. The paper presents work-in-progress addressing these issues.
The lecture takes place in B40 at the Trent Building on the University Park campus. For directions, see www.nottingham.ac.uk/about/visitorinformation/mapsanddirections/universityparkcampus.aspx
The Trent Building is marked as 11 on the campus map at www.nottingham.ac.uk/sharedresources/documents/mapuniversitypark.pdf
Please address any enquiries to:
Prof. Paul McDonald
Professor of Cinema and Media Industries
University of Nottingham
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