Sharing’s semantic unboundedness masks the corporate capture of data
Evidence
As Nicholas John points out, what is most striking about sharing as a metaphor is the extendibility of what is to be shared: from thoughts and pictures to information sources and life histories to everything and anything. Sharing our lives has come to imply a broader value of “openness and mutuality” but at the risk of mystifying the communities we supposedly form online. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 514
Categorization
- DEFINE: Explains the metaphor of ‘sharing’: its defining feature is infinite extendibility of what counts as shareable, which underwrites data extraction.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: Nicholas John’s original argument on the sharing metaphor, and how its extendibility interacts with the attention economy’s appeal to mutuality.
- XREF: connects to: Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale; Corporate data-as-asset rhetoric reframes untapped user data as a trillion-dollar revenue source — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 506; Corporate rationality masks everyday data extraction as routine business rather than appropriation — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 101 (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Corporate rationality masks everyday data extraction as routine business rather than appropriation
#corroborates(0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 101 - Corporate data-as-asset rhetoric reframes untapped user data as a trillion-dollar revenue source
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 506 - Surveillance capitalism subordinates earlier user reciprocities to derivative extraction for others’ aims
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 298 - Unaccountable abstract social knowledge functionally serves data-colonialist capitalism.
#corroborates(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 453 - Distributed commercial data collection is structurally opaque and hard to contest
#corroborates(0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 389 - Data’s commodifiability rests on abstracting away individual distinctiveness
#expands(0.80) - Data extraction infrastructures deform the self that autonomy and freedom depend on
#expands(0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 148 - Corporations treat streamed social data as a management surface
#qualifies(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 419 - Information capitalism requires semantic compression of behaviors into countable data tags.
#responds-to(0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 72 - The Quantified Self movement concedes individual property rights in data
#contradicts(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 519