Towards Digital Democracy? Digital Citizenship in an Era of Datafication

[This paper is part of the panel "The next stage of digital activism? Reviewing practices and concepts in the era of datafication"] Digital citizenship has served as one of the conceptual frameworks to capture activist digital practices and online interventions that contribute to public debate and social justice. Typically it has denoted an active and empowering form of citizenship, and it has suggested a shift towards enhanced agency by citizens and a democratizing trend in state-citizen relations. However, in the era of ‘datafication’, that understanding of citizenship becomes more complicated. As digital tools and platforms are now centred on the ability to generate, collect and analyze massive amounts of data, the exploitation of ‘big data’ has become a key factor for both economic success and political control. Data generated through social media, the so-called ‘sharing economy’, the Internet of Things and ‘smart’ devices, allows for the monitoring and categorization of people and for effective governance of social processes and institutions. Further, restrictions to online campaigning, citizen journalism, and other forms of digital citizenship are emerging on commercial platforms and through state policy. If digital citizenship is increasingly based on data traces and profiles, and the means of enacting citizenship are increasingly restricted and controlled, how does power shift between citizens and the state (i.e., between data producers and data collectors)? What are the possibilities for citizen agency and the implications for digital democracy? The paper will investigate these questions, based on findings from an empirical research project on digital citizenship in a post-Snowden era and on insights from the field of critical data studies.