Social data's role in law and political economy

Salomé Viljoen

Chapter 25 in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy, 2025, pp 435-444 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Understanding information is key to understanding the challenges of informational capitalism. This c hapter focuses on one important type of information: social data—the material store, in digital form, of information about people. It canvasses three ways legal scholarship can approach thinking about the data political economy. First, data as a commodity or key value form under informationalized capitalism. Second, data as neither a natural resource nor pure extension of individual personhood, but as a constructed and enacted social relation. Third, data as both a subject of law, and itself a means of governing—a form of power. These three approaches draw on my own work on data as materialized social relations, and on the strategies companies adopt to produce value from social data. It also synthesizes and draws on the work of several other scholars who study the digital political economy.

Keywords: Data; Information; Data governance; Privacy; Political economy; Informational capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803921181
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