'More Than What It Seems': How Critical Theory, Popular Engagement and Apps Like Tinder Can Help Us Reframe Metadata and Its Consequences

Metadata is a term no longer only of interest to information professionals; recently, it has also compelled a wider global population. How might the metadata community guide popular understandings around metadata’s relationship to privacy, surveillance, and identity building, while also taking cues from the outside to complement current professional practice? Rather than taking at face value the definitions, presentations, skills, practices and situations that we are told constitute the concept of metadata, we can consider alternative and complementary thinking, broadening what we consider to be metadata at all; this process of rethinking is known as problematization and has its roots in critical theory. We use problematization, as well as critical theory constructs like Derrida’s différance and digital trace, to examine the popular dating site Tinder, which we consider to be metadata in its own right. In doing so, we make new assumptions about metadata and its implications in digitally-mediated identity construction. We hope that our effort—a contribution to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and also to metadata studies—has professional implications, such as providing companion methods for reading metadata-dependent systems as ‘material metadata discourse.’ We likewise hope to show that popular, wider-world discourse can cast back onto our profession in a meaningful way

A Death in the Timeline: Memory and Metadata in Social Platforms

This paper explores a Life Event post from Facebook as a point of departure for critical data studies to understand how social media metadata shapes digital cultural memory and the disciplining of data subjects. I discuss some possible interventions that can contribute to our understanding of metadata’s role in the critical study of data, and in particular, how user generated metadata created in social platforms authored by state actors features in to new forms of information control, civic engagement, and networked information technologies. This discussion includes traditional concepts of concern and analysis for information and archival scholars, including creating data as a new form of belonging in society, collection tools and access policies, and the representation of events with metadata, such as death or state-sanctioned violence. In developing these concepts through a reading of a Life event that announces death and state power over life as it is represented in a social platform, I seek to expand the modes that information scholars use to address issues of time, context, and memory in digital archives and metadata emerging from social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Pre-print first published online 12/20/201