Visiting scholars Fatima Regis Oliveira (Rio de Janeiro State University - UERJ) and Daniel Marques (Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia - CECULT/UFRB) present their research on digital media technologies at the Center for 21st Century Studies (UW-Milwaukee) on October 25, 2019.
An essay version of my talk is available at the Thinking C21 blog.
"The Platformization of Everyday Life: Design, Privacy, and Dark Patterns"
Drawing on empirical research with mobile apps in Salvador-Bahia-Brazil, this talk addresses how everyday urban life is being increasingly hypermediated through digital platforms and user interfaces. This phenomenon, in turn, poses challenges to maintaining citizen privacy, as institutions seek to maximize the production and collection of sensitive personal data by implementing dark and malicious design patterns. By critiquing how these apps work, we can better understand and act upon the shaping of contemporary digital culture—one primarily based on platformization, datafication, and algorithmic performativity.