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Lecture by José Van Dijck: Governing Digital Societies

When 24 Oct 2019
from 04:00 PM to 06:00 PM
Where K. Mercierzaal, HIW
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Governing Digital Societies: the datafication of the Health sector

 

 

ABSTRACT

The growing pains of digitization involve intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government and civil society—raising important questions about responsibility and accountability. While two large ecosystems rule the global online world—a Chinese and American-based ecosystem—the latter has overwhelmingly penetrated Western-European societies, disrupting markets and labor relations, circumventing institutions, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies. Online platforms paradoxically bypass the institutional processes through which European democratic societies are organized, while at the same time they clash with local, national, and supra-national governments over who controls data-flows and algorithms.

 

Online architectures are governed by platform mechanisms that dominate both private and public sectors. Health care and health research is an important public sector that is increasingly platformized. Public values and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. This lecture concentrates on the growing influence of datafication and commodification of the health sector. At the heart this of surge is the battle over information control: who owns the health data generated by patients and general users? Who is responsible for anchoring public values in an online world? Particularly in the European context, governments and civil society organizations can be proactive in negotiating public values on behalf of citizens and consumers.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

José van Dijck is a distinguished university professor at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands); she was the president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2015 until 2018. She was a visiting professor at MIT (USA), University of Toronto (CAN), Stockholm University (SWE) and University of Technology, Sydney (AUS). She received an honorary doctorate from Lund University (SWE).

Van Dijck’s academic field is media studies and digital society. Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, media and communication technologies, social media, and digital culture. She is the (co-)author and (co-editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Van Dijck’s book The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) was distributed worldwide and was translated into Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. Her latest book, co-authored by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal is titled The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world (Oxford University Press, 2018); it is currently translated into Italian and Chinese.