Core Post 4 : Ciccone

While I'm usually a fan of provocative pieces that try to explore difficult objects by bringing together disparate concepts from different disciplines, I was somewhat left wanting after reading Couldry and Meijas' piece. In this post, I'm interested in highlighting some of the claims they make but never truly follow through and ask others what do they make of that.

Claim one: Positioning the West and China as poles of global tensions
As someone who studies China's digital economies, I was at first intrigued to see how they would position the new relational tensions between "the West" and China as they proposed in the introduction. Unfortunately, aside from their initial interrogation, the authors never truly go back to the potential differences that might arise when doing comparative analysis of the ways the West and China have dealt with data. While its sometimes tricky and problematic to highlight differences as broad as between "the West" and "China", I still think that an interesting through-line might have emerged in their comparaison, if only as a superficial divide that might have helped us understand their claims differently. How is the global, and the global south, reimagined by that specific tension? How does it make us rethink global points of tension?

Claim two: Colonialism
Even if it sets the tone perfectly for the other two articles for this week, I'm not convinced about the authors' used of the word colonialism to describe the mechanism that they highlight in their article. I think that some claims can be made about data colonialism but I was left frustrated by their argumentative decisions and their lack of engagements with the violences of colonialism (and data extraction) of vulnerable and marginalized subjects. Would another word have been better to describe the mechanisms that they highlight in their text? Was it simply used as a provocative term that helps readers imagined potential violences that the authors don't touch on? What was the role of such word within the article.