Big Data and the Digitalizing Society in China

Abstract

This thesis investigates the development of big data and the smart city, and the relationship between humans, digital technologies, and cities in the context of China. Contributing to the emerging interest of human geography in how big data and other digital technologies reshape the urban space and everyday life, the thesis presents a distinct data story about a digitalizing society of China. In a big data era, accompanying the ubiquity of digital devices and technologies is the lack of consciousness of their socio-political consequences, which nonetheless constitute an important productive aspect of society. Engaging with the discussions in human geography and beyond about the relationships between digital technologies and Deleuzian ‘societies of control’, Maurizio Lazzarato’s work on the production of subjectivity and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of the machine and the organism, I argue for further understandings of the coexistence of control and discipline as distinct yet dependent modes of social control. I place specific emphasis upon the coexisting processes of dividualisation and individualisation in the operation of big data and other digital technologies. The thesis further illustrates this through the empirical analysis of the development of two smart urbanism projects, the City Brain and the Health Code, and of short video platforms in China, which for me represent two different aspects of everyday life influenced by big data that concern two different political relations, that is, biopolitics, as understood by Michel Foucault, and noopolitics (i.e., politics of the mind) as understood by Lazzarato. In order to de-fetishize big data, the thesis proceeds to discuss its technicity by characterising big data as mnemotechnics, a real-time technology, and a cosmotechnology respectively through the work of philosophers Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui. This intervention is also a proposal to rethink and reinvent the relations between humans and digital technology. Turning to Foucault’s ‘aesthetic of existence’, the thesis discusses the possibility of alternative ways of life in a big data era and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, proposes ‘becoming a digital nomad’ as a methodology to live with digital technologies, explore new possibilities and events, embrace unplanned encounters, and make new, temporary connections in the big data era