Data materialization and digital literacies
An interview with dr. Luci Pangrazio
Dr. Luci Pangrazio, author of the book ‘Young People’s Literacies in the Digital Age’ and Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Educational Impact (REDI) talks to Find Out Why about the data literacies in young people’s digital worlds. Dr. Pangrazio argues that creative ways to materialise digital data are necessary in critical analysis.
By Elena Gkiola
Read the interview below or listen on Spotify
How would you describe your current work?
My current project is looking at the way data is materialized or represented to people. Graphs, metrics and dashboards are the dominant ways that we encounter data. With my project we are focusing on how we can materialize data differently, in order to arrive at different understandings.
How did you start with this project?
The last couple of years, I have been trying to support young people to develop their data literacies. This project is an extension of my work there. During my PhD I looked at how young people were using digital platforms. I made my observations through a little chat app that we built for that purpose. This app actually mimicked the commercial data processing that takes place on a lot of big tech platforms. We were able to show how the data, that kids were sharing through the app, were processed. We also materialized the kinds of inferences that could be made on the basis of that processing. All the participants were quite astonished by the findings.
What was the most fascinating element for those who used this app?
The most important part to that chat app was the geo-locational data. The participants saw where they have been travelling for a week in a series of red dots on the app. The fact that those data were stored and obvious made them more inclined to actually change their settings in order to protect and manage their data. My current project is an extension of this idea. We are looking at new ways to materialize data, through different kinds of images so to give people more agency.
How do you conceptualize datafication?
I think datafication really relates to more and more aspects of society. It is not just about privacy and surveillance. Datafication has become quite all encompassing, so we are not just talking about the array of platforms and sensors and data generating technologies, but also the huge advances that we are now seeing in data processing. This processing results to large data sets that are correlated in ways beyond individual’s comprehension. This has social and economic consequences. Ultimately, it leads to categorization; a sort of social sorting of people that intensifies the disadvantage and marginalization for certain groups.
Does your work offer policy recommendations?
Potentially it will have policy implications, but not just yet. My priority at the moment is how data is materialized in the family home. At the Center for the Digital Child we are trying to think about all the ways that data is materialized (devices, platforms etc.) and how different groups across Australia understand and navigate those different devices and platforms.
How is critical analysis different from research in general?
The goal of this work is to try to move beyond — or help my participants move beyond critique. There is a lot of work on the awareness of the different kinds of ways people are being tracked and profiled online, but at the same time without a kind of opportunity to act and change things people can feel powerless. Powerlessness is really something that I do not wish to instill in any of my participants.
Is it a bottom up approach?
Yes, I would say it is a bottom up approach. I am realizing of course that we need both bottom up and top down at the same time. The individual cannot really provide great resistance to some of these big tech companies, because they would end up missing out on experiences or making compromises that are unfair.
How can personal data literacies be integrated in a structural debate of data literacy?
Datafication can help make processes more efficient. It can personalize experiences. It can help people navigate news and information. There is a wealth of information on the Internet and a lot of people are completely bamboozled by it. Data essentially does help in that process of personalization, but if we are talking about the responses to the challenges of datafication (violence, surveillance, privacy, misinformation), then I think personal data literacies can be involved in empowering the user being able to adjust their privacy settings, and you know perhaps use some ad blockers and technical filters and maybe even data obfuscation (trying to disrupt the processing of data). One needs a certain amount of understanding, but also the skills and strategies to enact those defenses or resistances.
How discussions of data are pushed over subjectivity and fragmentation?
The terms and conditions of many tech platforms are so long and difficult to understand that is unfair to assume anyone can get their head around it alone. The mere fact that such business model even exists is deeply problematic. In my work with young people, providing spaces for collective reflection on those issues has been proven really powerful.
How can one create those spaces to begin with?
Materializing data (through the chat app for example) is the one really effective strategy. Some of the participants after the study were motivated to change their privacy settings, or tried to distort elements of their face, so that the sentiment analysis could not pick up their emotional state etc. At the same time though there is a genuine desire in human beings to connect with others. There are occasions where they want to be tracked for example. They want to be seen. It is a complex issue.
There is a confusion between data protection and privacy. What is the difference between those concepts?
Data protection is about protecting data from unauthorized use. In a way, it is up to the company’s response to protect your data from unauthorized hackers or other data breaches. That is often more of a technical kind of responsibility or better yet response. Whereas data privacy is more about who has [unauthorized] access to data. In principle it can be managed through privacy settings, but often it is more socially determined.
What about cyber safety?
Cyber safety is the dominant digital learning for young Australians here in schools. It is a very well-known discourse, a kind of protectionist discourse about risk aversion. It can be traced back to the notion of self-responsibility. Young individuals, they need support and the skills to kind of critically examine the platforms that they are using. That is where critical digital literacies come in, and help young people to develop that sense of agency online. It is not just interpreting the information, but also being able to redesign, reimagine, rewrite some of these technologies. To me digital literacies enriches cyber-safety a lot.
Is it something that in Australia is well documented or understood?
What tends to happen is that digital literacies is often about creating things, websites or stuff beyond digital content and that is certainly important, but I think the way I have always looked at digital literacy has been thinking about these enclosures where we spend all our time, as text that we need to really unravel and think about. What is the design of these things? Why is everything blue? Why are the images so large? Who benefits from us being on there for a long time? We are still yet to find those questions in a curriculum, but in general there is a collective understanding that digital spaces are not neutral spaces.
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