School of Social and Political Science

Dr Aphra Kerr
Are we all Lemmings now? Platform Logics & Data Imaginaries

Aphra will present emerging findings from a study: Data Intermediaries, Data Work & Data Inequalities: Towards Socially Responsible Data Driven Innovation. She will critically engage with official and public discourses surrounding data driven innovation and in particular plans to establish Edinburgh and the South East of Scotland as the data capital of Europe.

In 1991, DMA Design, based in Dundee Scotland, released a puzzle-platformer video game called ‘Lemmings’ for the Amiga, Atari and PC. With sales of over 20 million the designer David Jones not only invented a new genre, he also put the Scottish games industry on the international map. There is even a Lemmings statue in Dundee! DMA Design went on to become Rockstar Games and achieved worldwide success with a rather better known game franchise ‘Grand Theft Auto’.

While for game fans the concept of the ‘platform’ might mean a simple and repetitive side scrolling game, the general public understanding of the term ‘platform’ has become more synonymous with free digital services offered by companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon in return for personal data. The emergence of a platform ‘logic’ driven by the commodification of data, the ‘intelligence’ of algorithms and the brokerage of a small number of commercial platforms has become synonymous with the contemporary age in many sectors of society. Recently scholars have described this as platform capitalism, platform economics or the ‘platform society’ (Srnicek 2017, Codagnone, Karatzogianni, and Matthews 2019 , van Dijck 2014). It has variously been described as a new gold rush and a new era of colonialism (Beer 2017, Couldry and Mejias 2018).

 Aphra Kerr is Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Ireland. Recent publications include: Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Age, Routledge, 2017. Her recent work has examined production, circulation and policy in the global games industry and the datafication of cultural production (Kerr 2017). She is visiting Edinburgh University on a fellowship based in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

 Aphra will present emerging findings from a study:  Data Intermediaries, Data Work & Data Inequalities: Towards Socially Responsible Data Driven Innovation. She will critically engage with official and public discourses surrounding data driven innovation and in particular plans to establish Edinburgh and the South East of Scotland as the data capital of Europe. What are the expectations and imaginaries underpinning these plans (Mansell 2012, van Lente 2012)? Do they envisage ethical or responsible research and innovation (RRI)? If so, whose ethics and values? And who will deliver on these visions?  This is part of a longer-term investigation into the implications of platform logics and data driven innovation for data workers, cultural production and social reproduction.