Datafied living: pursuing human flourishing through mundane self-tracking across personal, work and institutional contexts in the welfare state.

Project Information

DATAFIED LIVING

Grant agreement ID: 947735

DOI

10.3030/947735

Project closed

EC signature date 24 November 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 426 201,00

EU contribution

€ 1 426 201,00

Coordinated by

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - DATAFIED LIVING (Datafied living: pursuing human flourishing through mundane self-tracking across personal, work and institutional contexts in the welfare state.)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

DATAFIED LIVING provides rich empirical evidence on how Danes from all walks of life experience and make meaning of the general datafication of everyday life. At the core, we ask how self-tracking and the tracking of others feed into perceptions and aspirations of the good life. The project produces substantially new cross-contextual knowledge as our empirical efforts at understanding the pervasive tracking and datafication of almost any aspect of life span across personal, work and institutional contexts in the welfare state of Denmark. We combine maps of the infrastructural conditions for digital tracking, trace data flows from personal to commercial and public domains and assess people’s critical consciousness and agency in pursuing the lives they value with data. This is all to qualify societal debates about the prospects and challenges for enhancing good, safe and meaningful datafied living for all.
The core project objective is to demonstrate the merits of cross-pollinating infrastructural and user-centric research perspectives to a comprehensive account of what it means to live a good and meaningful datafied life in the Danish welfare state, with a view to overall developments across Europe. For research this involves also consolidating a cutting-edge research agenda around the role of digital tracking in society.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project has successfully completed a year-long fieldwork with +70 Danes to produce infrastructural mappings, a database of app use across the sample of Danes, and a substantial set of qualitative materials about the participants’ daily experiences of getting things done and living with data, as well as their aspirations for what data should enable them to accomplish in the future.

The final step of the empirical studies is to follow people’s data traces into key organisations that make use of tracking and databasing of citizens and consumers to pursue organizational aims, economic value creation, and welfare for the people. Fieldwork for this part is underway.

Once completed, the empirical evidence will be unprecedented in detail, and will allow for interventions with policy-makers and other stakeholders to help qualify political and regulatory efforts around digital tracking and datafication.

So far, the project team has produced and published ten journal articles in top-tier venues and book chapters in significant collections to 1) establish a communication-theory framework for the advancement of research into datafied living, combining infrastructural and user-centric analyses; 2) untangle mobile app economies as data markets; 3) expose the infrastructural power underpinning key institutions of the Danish welfare state with reference to public-private partnerships in tech-development, and 4) begin to assess how digital tracking becomes part and parcel of mundane living integrating in people's pursuits of getting things done in ways that are meaningful and feasible, given their life situations and aspirations.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project moves significantly beyond the state of the art by framing and empirically studying datafication as something mundane and deeply embedded in daily living and the functioning of businesses and society. This enables us to produce a comprehensive account of how data-driven processes come to shape contemporary life. DATAFIED LIVING also pushes the study of datafication beyond the state of the art by integrating infrastructural and people-centric studies, which are seldom in dialogue, under a uniting framework of communication from which we can qualify the potential for agency and push-back against the possible negative implications of datafication.

More than a handful of significant publications based on the empirical data are underway, and as the project progresses further, we expect to increase activities related to bringing scientific knowledge to policy-makers and the public at large.