Political Agency, Digital Traces and Bottom-up Data Practices

This paper explores the bottom up data practices enacted by individuals and groups in the context of organized collective action. Entering in a dialogue with critical media theory, the sociology of social movements, and platform studies, it asks how activists largely reliant on social media for their activities leverage datafication per se, and mobilize social media data in their tactics and narratives. More precisely, it explores how activists make sense of the ways in which social media structure their interactions, and how they leverage these for mobilization. Using the concept of digital traces as a heuristic tool to understand the dynamics between social media platforms and their users, the presentation foregrounds human agency and the sense-making activities of individuals and groups in relation to the materiality of platforms. It reflects on the concurrent materiality and discursiveness of digital traces, identifying five discourse properties of digital traces enabled by their materiality: measurement, visualization, performance and modified temporality. It analyses the evolution of political agenda vis-à-vis the datafied self, and explores how digital traces trigger a quest for visibility that is unprecedented in the realm of organized collective action, and how they work as particular “agency machines”. In so doing, the paper contributes to the study of “the variable ways in which power and participation are constructed and enacted” [1] in bottom up data practices, and to our understanding of the interplay between social media and political agency. [1] Couldry, N., & Powell, A. (2014). Big data from the bottom up. Big Data & Society, 1(2), 1–5.