35 research outputs found
Practicing, Materialising and Contesting Environmental Data (Introduction to Special Issue)
While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised
ICTs connecting global citizens, global dialogue and global governance. A call for needful designs
Humankind is on the transition to a supra-system of humanity, according
to which social relationships – that organise the common good – are re-organised
such that global challenges are kept below the threshold of a self-inflicted
breakdown. In order to succeed, three conditions are imperative: (1) Global governance
needs a global conscience that orients towards the protection of the common
good. (2) Such global governance needs a global dialogue on the state of
the common good and the ways to proceed. (3) Such a global dialogue needs
global citizens able to reflect upon the current state of the common good and the
ways to proceed to desired states. Each of these imperatives is about a space of
possibilities. Each space nests the following one such that they altogether form
the scaffolding along which institutions can emerge that realise the imperatives
when proper nuclei are introduced in those spaces. Such nuclei would already
support each other. However, the clue is to further their integration by Information
and Communication Technologies. An information platform shall be
launched that could cover any task on any of the three levels, entangled with the
articulation of cooperative action from the local to the global, based on the cybersubsidiarity
model. This model is devised to ensure the percolation of meaningful
information throughout the different organisational levels.2019-2