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In recent years, popular media has inundated audiences with sensationalised headlines recounting data breaches, new forms of surveillance and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives.From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognising the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies.Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable circumstances, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity, and a new politics of change.
List of contents
Introduction: Technology and the Axes of Hope and Fear1. Life in the Age of Big Data2. What is Our Data?3. Existing Everyday Resistances4. Contesting the Data Spectacle5. Our Data are Us, So Make Them OursConclusion: Where Is Our Strike?
About the author
Jim E. Thatcher is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma.
Craig M. Dalton is Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University.
Summary
An introduction to learning how to protect ourselves and organise against Big Data
