From apps to smart cribs, digital tools for parents abound.

One of the key critical questions of our times is the understanding of how data, algorithmic logics and AI are altering our agency as citizens, and what forms of resistance and opposition are emerging on the ground. Some scholars have shown how algorithms both prohibit as well as aid activists’ agency (Milan, 2018; Treré, 2019; Etter and Albu, 2021), while others have focused on how individual activists challenge the power of algorithms and reclaim a sense of agency (Velkova and Kaun, 2021). Although over the last years much research has emerged on the civic and human rights implications of automated systems and algorithmic profiling, little attention has been paid to what was happening on the ground and how social movement actors were actively organising against algorithmic profiling. In this paper, we draw on ten semi-structured interviews with actors from civil society or non-governmental organisations in Europe, who struggle against algorithmic decision making, and combine these findings with a qualitative textual analysis of ten campaign websites, both conducted in the context of a wider research project exploring the conflict over algorithmic profiling. The aim of the paper is to shed light on the discourses and practices of social movement actors when it comes to resisting algorithmic injustices. The key question that we are interested in addressing is to explore how – in the everyday resistance to algorithmic profiling – actors rely on three different strategies of action (algorithmic literacy, algorithmic regulation and algorithmic accountability).

This chapter draws on the findings of an ethnographic research project that investigated the datafication of family life in two world cities: London and Los Angeles and argues for the importance of doing 'data ethnography'. Inspired by both analyses of global culture and critical media studies, I play with the notion that when we think about data ethnography, we can look at the multiple ways in which the lived experience of big data and surveillance capitalism is contingent on context and culturally specific political economic networks, sensory experiences, and personal understandings of technologies and privacy. The chapter also argues that to carry out data ethnography, we might develop a multi-method approach; one that simultaneously follows the data and the people, and that brings together auto-ethnographic/sensory research with a political economic analysis of structures and technologies of data. This type of worldly data ethnography may enable us to appreciate the human and cultural complexity of datafication while taking into account critical questions about place, power, and politics.

The rise of generative AI confronts us with new and key questions about AI failure, and how we make sense of and learn how to coexist with it. Whilst computer scientists understand AI failure as something that we can learn from and predict (Amodei et al., 2016; Yampolskiy 2018, p. 142), in this article I argue that we need to understand AI failure as a complex social reality that is defined by the interconnection between our data, technological design, and structural inequalities (Benjamin, 2019; Broussard, 2023) by processes of commodification (Appadurai & Alexander, 2019) and by everyday political and social conflicts (Aradau & Blanke, 2021). Yet I also show that to make sense of the complexity of AI failure we need a theory of AI errors. Bringing philosophical approaches to error theory together with anthropological perspectives, I argue that a theory of error is essential because it sheds light on the fact that the failures in our systems derive from processes of erroneous knowledge production, from mischaracterisations and flawed cognitive relations. A theory of AI errors, therefore, ultimately confronts us with the question about what types of cognitive relations and judgements define our AI systems, and sheds light on their deep-seeded limitations when it comes to making sense of our social worlds and human life.

The ever-greater use of AI-driven technologies in the health sector begs moral questions regarding what it means for algorithms to mis-understand and mis-measure human health and how as a society we are understanding AI errors in health. This article argues that AI errors in health are putting us in front of the problem that our AI technologies do not grasp the full pluriverse of human experience, and rely on data and measures that have a long history of scientific bias. However, as we shall see in this paper, contemporary public debate on the issue is very limited. Drawing on a discourse analysis of 520 European news media articles reporting on AI-errors the article will argue that the ‘media frame’ on AI errors in health is often defined by a techno-solutionist perspective, and only rarely it sheds light on the relationship between AI technologies and scientific bias. Yet public awareness on the issue is of central importance because it shows us that rather than ‚fixing‘ or ‚finding solutions‘ for AI errors we need to learn how to coexist with the fact that technlogies – because they are human made, are always going to be inevitably biased.

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.

An examination of the datafication of family life—in particular, the construction of our children into data subjects. Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through childhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. In Child Data Citizen, Veronica Barassi examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. Children today are the very first generation of citizens to be datafied from before birth, and Barassi points to critical implications for our democratic futures. Barassi draws on a three-year research project with parents in London and Los Angeles, which included the collection of fifty in-depth interviews, a digital ethnography of “sharenting” activities on social media by eight families over the course of eight months, and a two-year exploration of the datafication of her own family. She complements her ethnographic findings with a platform analysis of four social media platforms, ten health tracking apps, four home hubs, and four educational platforms, investigating the privacy policies, business models, and patent applications that enable the mining of children's data. Barassi considers the implications of building a society where data traces are made to speak for and about citizens across a lifetime. What should we do when we realize that the narratives that algorithms construct about individuals are inaccurate and biased?

This chapter explores the complex relationship between youth, political participation and data traces. It argues that in the last 20 years youth cultures have been defined by the emergence of new forms of political participation, which were often self-centered, networked, and flexible. The chapter discusses the turn attention to these forms of self-enactment, participation and performance online by analyzing the relationship between digital storytelling and self-construction. It focuses on the current techno-historical transformation. As it can enable us to shift contemporary debates on data traces and youth from the focus on privacy and surveillance to a critical analysis on freedom of expression, self-representation and data justice. The autonomous discourses of the movements for global justice have created the basis for a new reformulation of political identity and belonging. A lot can be said the latest political constellations, and the multiple ways in which party and movement politics have come to intersect.

This article maps three different yet interconnected hegemonic temporalities that define data technologies:immediacy, archivalandpredictive time. These hegemonic temporalities, it will be argued, cannot be understood without considering the political economic structures ofsurveillance capitalism. However, to understand the relationship between data technologies and the social construction of time, we also need to consider the multiple ways in which these temporalities are reproduced and experienced through everydaytemporalizing practices.Drawing on an ethnographic project which investigates the impact of data technologies on family life, the article will explore different ways in which these temporalities are impacting the lived experience of family life. Looking at the ways in which everyday experiences intersect with hegemonic constructions of time enables us to ask critical questions about how data technologies surveille and govern subjects through time and consider their implication for our democratic futures.

In the past two decades, a rising number of studies have investigated the complex relationship between the media and social movements. Within this body of research, media technologies are considere...

This article explores the relationship between surveillance capitalism, big data, and the emergence of a new type of datafied citizenship by looking at two different, yet interconnected, dimensions. In the first place, it considers how under surveillance capitalism individuals are being profiled simultaneously as consumer and citizen subjects by a complex political economic infrastructure that brings private and public entities together. In the second place, it argues that surveillance capitalism depends on the systematic coercion of digital participation, which forces citizens to comply with data technologies and give up their personal data. If we want to understand the extent of these transformation, the article argues, we need to look at children. Children have traditionally been excluded from debates about citizenship because they have often been understood as not-yet citizens or future citizens. Yet, in the study of the relationship between data and citizenship, children today are the key. They are the very first generation of citizens who are datafied from before they are born and are coerced into digitally participating to society through the data traces produced, collected, and processed by others without their consent or control. Drawing on the findings of the Child | Data | Citizen project, an ethnographically informed research project on big data and family life in the UK and US, this article will highlight some of the democratic challenges that emerge when we think about data, surveillance capitalism, and citizenship in everyday life.

The rapid proliferation of self-tracking pregnancy apps raises critical questions about the commodification and surveillance of personal data in family life while highlighting key transformations in the social experience of pregnancy. In the last 2 years, we have seen the emergence of significant research in the field. On one hand, scholars have highlighted the political economic dimension of these apps by showing how they relate to new practices of quantification of the self. On the other hand, they have focused on users' experience and on the affective, pleasurable, and socially meaningful dimension of these technologies. Although insightful, current research has yet to consider the cultural specificity of these technologies. Drawing on a digital ethnography of the 10 most reviewed pregnancy apps among UK and US users at the beginning of 2016, the article will show not only that the information ecologies of pregnancy apps are extremely varied but also that users' interaction with these technologies is critical and culturally specific. By discussing pregnancy apps as complex ethnographic environments-which are shaped by different cultural tensions and open-ended processes of negotiation, interaction, and normativity-the article will argue that-in the study of infancy online-we need to develop a media anthropological approach and shed light on the cultural complexity of digital technologies while taking into account how users negotiate with digital surveillance and the quantification of the self.

In the last decades, different scholars have focused on how political participation has been transformed by digital media. Although insightful, current research in the field lacks a critical understanding of the personal and affective dimension of online political participation. This paper aims to address this gap by looking at the interconnection between digital storytelling, identity narratives and family life. Drawing on an ethnographic research, the paper shows that activists construct their political identities online through complex practices of digital storytelling that involve the reinterpretation of early childhood and family life. These processes of digital storytelling have an un-intended consequence: they enable the political profiling of different family members. The paper argues that these digital practices, which produce politically identifying digital traces, are transforming political socialisation in family life and introducing new ways in which we can think digital citizenship across the life course.