The Digital Prism Transparency and Managed Visibilities in a Datafied World

We live in times of transparency. Digital technologies expose everything we do, like, and search for, and it is difficult to remain private and out of sight. Meanwhile, many people are concerned about the unchecked powers of tech giants and the hidden operations of big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms and call for more openness and insight. How do we - as individuals, companies and societies - deal with these technological and social transformations? Seen through the prism of digital technologies and data, our lives take new shapes and we are forced to manage our visibilities carefully. This book challenges common ways of thinking about transparency, and argues that the management of visibilities is a crucial, but overlooked force that influences how people live, how organizations work, and how societies and politics operate in a digital, datafied world.

Introduction. The transparency formula; 1. Digital and datafied spaces; 2. Transparency and managed visibilities; 3. People under scrutiny; 4. Organizations gone transparent; 5. Seeing the world; Conclusion. Life in the digital prism; Acknowledgments; Bibliography; Index.

Mikkel Flyverbom is Professor of Communication and Digital Transformations and Academic Director of the research platform Digital Transformations at Copenhagen Business School. He is also a Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a regular columnist for the Danish newspaper Politiken and a widely used expert on tech issues. He is the author of The Power of Networks: Organizing the Global Politics of the Internet (2011).