Social sciences may themselves be complicit in datafied hollowing out of the social

Evidence

Can the human and social sciences correct for the limits of the social quantification sector’s emerging model of the world? Or might much of the social sciences already be complicit in this hollowing out of the social? This claim might shock those who see in “datafication … an essential enrichment in human comprehension” or “a great infrastructural project that rivals” the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie. But let’s get beyond the hype and look at what is actually going on in the social sciences today. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 431

Categorization

• QUESTION: The provocation — that social science may be complicit rather than corrective — is posed and deferred; worth chasing the empirical pay-off in later chapters.
• XREF: connects to: Social science complicity weakens resistance to data colonialism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 580; Unaccountable abstract social knowledge functionally serves data-colonialist capitalism. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 453; Nineteenth-century statistics was publicly debated; today’s ML computing the social goes unobserved. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 380 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Social science complicity weakens resistance to data colonialism #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 580
• Unaccountable abstract social knowledge functionally serves data-colonialist capitalism. #corroborates (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 453