TY - JOUR
T1 - Doing nothing does something
T2 - Embodiment and data in the COVID-19 pandemic
AU - Vallee, Mickey
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs programme.
Funding Information:
The author thanks the editors and peer reviewers at Big Data & Society for their invaluable insights and encouragement, and his colleagues at Athabasca University for their unending support. The author thanks, especially, all of the frontline workers.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/1
Y1 - 2020/1
N2 - The COVID-19 pandemic redefines how we think about the body, physiologically and socially. But what does it mean to have and to be a body in the COVID-19 pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic offers data scholars the unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to revisit and reinvent the fundamental concepts of our mediated experiences. The article critiques the data double, a longstanding concept in critical data and media studies, as incompatible with the current public health and social distancing imperative. The data double, instead, is now the presupposition of a new data entity, which will emerge out of a current data shimmer: a long-sustaining transition that blurs the older boundaries of bodies and the social, and establishes new ethical boundaries around the (in)activity and (im)mobility of doing nothing to do something. The data double faces a unique dynamic in the COVID-19 pandemic between boredom and exhaustion. Following the currently simple rule to stay home presents data scholars the opportunity to revisit the meaning of data as something given, a shimmering embodied relationship with data that contributes to the common good in a global health crisis.
AB - The COVID-19 pandemic redefines how we think about the body, physiologically and socially. But what does it mean to have and to be a body in the COVID-19 pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic offers data scholars the unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to revisit and reinvent the fundamental concepts of our mediated experiences. The article critiques the data double, a longstanding concept in critical data and media studies, as incompatible with the current public health and social distancing imperative. The data double, instead, is now the presupposition of a new data entity, which will emerge out of a current data shimmer: a long-sustaining transition that blurs the older boundaries of bodies and the social, and establishes new ethical boundaries around the (in)activity and (im)mobility of doing nothing to do something. The data double faces a unique dynamic in the COVID-19 pandemic between boredom and exhaustion. Following the currently simple rule to stay home presents data scholars the opportunity to revisit the meaning of data as something given, a shimmering embodied relationship with data that contributes to the common good in a global health crisis.
KW - COVID-19
KW - data double
KW - data shimmer
KW - embodiment
KW - pandemic
KW - quarantine
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086563887&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/2053951720933930
DO - 10.1177/2053951720933930
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086563887
VL - 7
JO - Big Data and Society
JF - Big Data and Society
IS - 1
ER -